To Love and Be Wise, by Josephine Tey (2024)

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TO LOVE AND

BE WISE

JOSEPHINE TEY

LONDON: PETER DAVIES

FIRST PUBLISHED 1950

REPRINTED FEBRUARY 1953

The verses on page 188 are quoted from A Soldier Looks at Beauty, by
Hugh P. F. McIntosh, published by Messrs. Simpkin Marshall, Ltd.

This book is fiction, and all the characters
and incidents in it are entirely imaginary

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR PETER DAVIES LTD.
AT THE PITMAN PRESS, BATH

I

Grant paused with his foot on the lowest step,and listened to the shrieking from the floor above. As well as theshrieks there was a dull continuous roar; an elemental sound, like aforest fire or a river in spate. As his reluctant legs bore himupwards he arrived at the inevitable deduction: the party was being asuccess.

He was not going to the party. Literary sherry parties, evendistinguished ones, were not Grant's cup of tea. He was going tocollect Marta Hallard and take her out to dinner. Policemen, it istrue, do not normally take out to dinner leading actresses whogravitate between the Haymarket and the Old Vic; not even when thepolicemen are Detective-Inspectors at Scotland Yard. There were threereasons for his privileged position, and Grant was aware of all three.In the first place he was a presentable escort, in the second place hecould afford to dine at Laurent's, and in the third place MartaHallard did not find it easy to obtain escort. For all her standing,and her chic, men were a little afraid of Marta. So when Grant, a mereDetective-Sergeant then, appeared in her life over a matter of stolenjewellery, she had seen to it that he did not entirely fade out of itagain. And Grant had been glad to stay. If he was useful to Marta as acavalier when she needed one, she was even more useful to him as awindow on the world. The more windows on the world a policeman has thebetter he is likely to be at his job, and Marta was Grant's 'leper'ssquint' on the theatre.

The roar of the party's success came flooding out through the open doorson to the landing, and Grant paused to look at the yelling crowdasparagus-packed into the long Georgian room and to wonder how he wasgoing to pry Marta out of it.

Just inside the door, baffled apparently by the solid wall of talking anddrinking humanity, was a young man, looking lost. He still had his hat inhis hand, and had therefore just arrived.

'In difficulties?' Grant said, catching his eye.

'I've forgotten my megaphone,' the young man said.

He said it in a gentle drawl, not bothering to compete with the crowd. Themere difference in pitch made the words more audible than if he hadshouted. Grant glanced at him again, approvingly. He was a verygood-looking young man indeed, now that he took notice. Too blond to beentirely English. Norwegian, perhaps?

Or American. There was something in the way he said 'forgotten' that wastransatlantic.

The early spring afternoon was already blue against the windows and thelamps were lit. Across the haze of cigarette smoke Grant could see Martaat the far end of the room listening to Tullis the playwright telling herabout his royalties. He did not have to hear what Tullis was talking aboutto know that he was talking about his royalties; that is all Tullis evertalked about. Tullis could tell you, off-hand, what the Number Two companyof his Supper for Three took on Easter Monday in Blackpool in 1938.Marta had given up even a pretence of listening, and her mouth drooped atthe corners. Grant thought that if that D.B.E. did not come along soonMarta would be disappointed into the need for a face-lifting. He decidedto stay where he was until he could catch her eye. They were both tallenough to see over the heads of a normal crowd.

With a policeman's ingrained habit of inspection he let his eye run overthe crowd between them, but found nothing of interest. It was the usualcollection. The very prosperous firm of Ross and Cromarty were celebratingthe publication of Lavinia Fitch's twenty-first book, and since it waslargely due to Lavinia that the firm was prosperous the drinks wereplentiful and the guests were distinguished. Distinguished in the sense ofbeing well-dressed and well-known, that is to say. The distinguished inachievement did not celebrate the birth of Maureen's Lover, nor drinkthe sherry of Messrs Ross and Cromarty. Even Marta, that inevitable Dame,was here because she was a neighbour of Lavinia's in the country. AndMarta, bless her black-and-white chic and her disgruntled look, was thenearest thing to real distinction in the room.

Unless, of course, this young man whom he did not know brought more thangood looks to the party. He wondered what the stranger did for a living.An actor? But an actor would not stand baffled at the edge of a crowd. Andthere was something in the implied comment of his remark about themegaphone, in the detachment with which he was watching the scene, thatdivorced him from his surroundings. Was it possible, Grant wondered, thatthose cheekbones were being wasted in a stockbroker's office? Or was itperhaps that the soft light of Messrs Ross and Cromarty's expensive lampsflattered that nice straight nose and the straight blond hair and that theyoung man was less beautiful in the daylight?

'Perhaps you can tell me,' said the young man, still not raising his voicein emulation, 'which is Miss Lavinia Fitch?'

Lavinia was the sandy little woman by the middle window. She had boughtherself a fashionable hat for the occasion, but had done nothing toaccommodate it; so that the hat perched on her bird's-nest of ginger hairas if it had dropped there from an upper window as she walked along thestreet. She was wearing her normal expression of pleased bewilderment andno make-up.

Grant pointed her out to the young man.

'Stranger in town?' he said, borrowing a phrase from all good Westerns.The polite formality of 'Miss Lavinia Fitch' could have come only from theU.S.A.

'I'm really looking for Miss Fitch's nephew. I looked him up in the bookand he isn't there, but I hoped he'd be here. Do you happen to know him,Mr——?

'Grant.'

'Mr Grant?'

'I know him by sight, but he isn't here. Walter Whitmore, you mean?''Yes. Whitmore. I don't know him at all, but I want very much to meet himbecause we have—had, I mean—a great friend in common. I was sure he'd behere. You're quite sure he isn't? After all, it's quite a party.'

'He isn't in this room; I know that, because Whitmore is as tall as I am.But he may still be around somewhere. Look, you had better come and meetMiss Fitch. I suppose we can get through the barricade if we have thedetermination.'

'You lean and I'll squirm,' said the young man, referring to theirrespective build. 'This is very kind of you, Mr Grant,' he said as theycame up for air half-way, wedged tightly together between the hedgedelbows and shoulders of their fellows; and he laughed up at the helplessGrant. And Grant was suddenly disconcerted. So disconcerted that he turnedimmediately and continued his struggle through the jungle to the clearingat the middle window where Lavinia Fitch was standing.

'Miss Fitch,' he said, 'here is a young man who wants to meet you. He istrying to get in touch with your nephew.'

'With Walter?' said Lavinia, her peaked little face losing its muzzyexpression of general benevolence and sharpening to real interest.

'My name is Searle, Miss Fitch. I'm over from the States on holiday and Iwanted to meet Walter because Cooney Wiggin was a friend of mine too.'

'Cooney! You are a friend of Cooney's? Oh, Walter will be delighted, mydear, simply delighted. Oh, what a nice surprise in the middle of this—Imean, so unexpected. Walter will be pleased. Searle, did you say?'

'Yes. Leslie Searle. I couldn't find Walter in the book——'

'No, he has just a pied-à-terre in town. He lives down at Salcott St Marylike the rest of us. Where he has the farm, you know. The farm hebroadcasts about. At least it's my farm but he runs it and talks about itand—dash;. He's broadcasting this afternoon, that is why he isn't coming tothe party. But you must come down and stay. Come down this weekend. Comeback with us this afternoon.'

'But you don't know if Walter——'

'You don't have any engagements for the weekend, do you?'

'No. No, I haven't. But——'

'Well, then. Walter is going straight back from the studio, but you cancome with Liz and me in our car and we'll surprise him. Liz! Liz, dear,where are you? Where are you staying, Mr Searle?'

'I'm at the Westmorland.'

'Well, what could be handier. Liz! Where is Liz?'

'Here, Aunt Lavinia.'

'Liz, dear, this is Leslie Searle, who is coming back with us for theweekend. He wants to meet Walter because they were both friends ofCooney's. And this is Friday, and we are all going to be at Salcott overthe weekend recovering from this—being nice and quiet and peaceful, sowhat could be more appropriate. So, Liz dear, you take him round to theWestmorland and help him pack and then come back for me, will you? By thattime this—the party will surely be over, and you can pick me up and we'llgo back to Salcott together and surprise Walter.'

Grant saw the interest in the young man's face as he looked at LizGarrowby, and wondered a little. Liz was a small plain girl with a sallowface. True, she had remarkable eyes; speedwell blue and surprising; andshe had the kind of face a man might want to live with; she was a nicegirl, Liz. But she was not the type of girl at whom young men look withinstant attention. Perhaps it was just that Searle had heard rumours ofher engagement, and was identifying her as Walter Whitmore's fiancée.

He lost interest in the Fitch ménage as he saw that Marta had spotted him.He indicated that he would meet her at the door, and plunged once moreinto the suffocating depths. Marta, being the more ruthless of the two,did the double distance in half the time and was waiting for him in thedoorway.

'Who is the beautiful young man?' she asked, looking backwards as theymoved to the stairs.

'He came looking for Walter Whitmore. He says he's a friend of CooneyWiggin.'

'Says?' repeated Marta, being caustic not about the young man but aboutGrant.

'The police mind,' Grant said apologetically.

'And who is Cooney Wiggin, anyhow?'

'Cooney was one of the best-known press photographers in the States. Hewas killed while photographing one of those Balkan flare-ups a year or twoago.'

'You know everything, don't you.'

It was on the tip of Grant's tongue to say: 'Anyone but an actress wouldhave known that,' but he liked Marta. Instead he said: 'He is going downto Salcott for the weekend, I understand.'

'The beautiful young man? Well, well. I hope Lavinia knows what she isdoing.'

'What is wrong with having him down?'

'I don't know, but it seems to me to be taking risks with their luck.'

'Luck?'

'Everything has worked out the way they wanted it to, hasn't it? Waltersaved from Marguerite Merriam and settling down to marry Liz; all familytogether in the old homestead and too cosy for words. No time to gointroducing disconcertingly beautiful young men into the ménage, it seemsto me.'

'Disconcerting,' murmured Grant, wondering again what had disconcerted himabout Searle. Mere good looks could not have been responsible. Policemenare not impressed by good looks.

'I wager that Emma takes one look at him and gets him out of the housedirectly after breakfast on Monday morning,' Marta said. 'Her darling Lizis going to marry Walter, and nothing is going to stop that if Emma hasanything to do with it.'

'Liz Garrowby doesn't look very impressionable to me. I don't see why MrsGarrowby should worry.'

'Don't you indeed. That boy was making an impression on me in thirtyseconds flat and a range of twenty yards, and I'm considered practicallyincombustible. Besides, I never believed that Liz really fell in love withthat stick. She just wanted to bind up his broken heart.'

'Was it badly broken?'

'Considerably shaken, I should say. Naturally.'

'Did you ever act with Marguerite Merriam?'

'Oh, yes. More than once. We were together for quite a lengthy run inWalk in Darkness. There's a taxi coming.'

'Taxi! What did you think of her?'

'Marguerite? Oh, she was mad, of course.'

'How mad?'

'Ten tenths.'

'In what way?'

'You mean how did it take her? Oh, a complete indifference to everythingbut the thing she wanted at the moment.'

That isn't madness; that is merely the criminal mind at its simplest.'

'Well, you ought to know, my dear. Perhaps she was a criminal manqué. Whatis quite certain is that she was as mad as a hatter and I wouldn't wisheven Walter Whitmore a fate like being married to her.'

'Why do you dislike the British Public's bright boy so much?'

'My dear, I hate the way he yearns. It was bad enough when he wasyearning over the thyme on an Aegean hillside with the bullets zippingpast his ears—he never failed to let us hear the bullets: I alwayssuspected that he did it by cracking a whip——'

'Marta, you shock me.'

'I don't, my dear; not one little bit. You know as well as I do. When wewere all being shot at, Walter took care that he was safe in a nicefuggy office fifty feet underground. Then when it was once more unique tobe in danger, up comes Walter from his little safe office and sits himselfon a thymey hillside with a microphone and a whip to make bullet noiseswith.'

'I see that I shall have to bail you out, one of these days.'

'Homicide?'

'No; criminal libel.'

'Do you need bail for that? I thought it was one of those nice gentlemanlythings that you are just summonsed for.'

Grant thought how independable Malta's ignorances were.

'It might still be homicide, though,' Marta said, in the cooing,considering voice that was her trade-mark on the stage. 'I could juststand the thyme and the bullets, but now that he has taken a ninety-nineyears' lease of the spring corn, and the woodpeckers, and things, heamounts to a public menace.'

'Why do you listen to him?'

'Well, there's a dreadful fascination about it, you know. One thinks:Well, that's the absolute sky-limit of awfulness, than which nothingcould be worse. And so next week you listen to see if it really can beworse. It's a snare. It's so awful that you can't even switch off. Youwait fascinated for the next piece of awfulness, and the next. And you arestill there when he signs off.'

'It couldn't be, could it, Marta, that this is mere professionaljealousy?'

'Are you suggesting that the creature is a professional?' asked Marta,dropping her voice a perfect fifth, so that it quivered with thereflection of repertory years, and provincial digs, and Sunday trains, anddreary auditions in cold dark theatres.

'No, I'm suggesting that he is an actor. A quite natural and unconsciousactor, who has made himself a household word in a few years without doingany noticeable work to that end. I could forgive you for not liking that.What did Marguerite find so wonderful about him?'

'I can tell you that. His devotion. Marguerite liked picking the wings offflies. Walter would let her take him to pieces and then come back formore.'

'There was one time that he didn't come back.'

'Yes.'

'What was the final row about, do you know?'

'I don't think there was one. I think he just told her he was through. Atleast that is what he said at the inquest. Did you read the obituaries, bythe way?'

'I suppose I must have at the time. I don't remember them individually.'

'If she had lived another ten years she would have got a tiny par in amongthe "ads" on the back page. As it was she got better notices than Duse. "Aflame of genius has gone out and the world is the poorer." "She had thelightness of a blown leaf and the grace of a willow in the wind." Thatsort of thing. One was surprised that there were no black edges in thePress. The mourning was practically of national dimensions.'

'It's a far cry from that to Liz Garrowby.'

'Dear, nice Liz. If Marguerite Merriam was too bad even for WalterWhitmore, then Liz is too good for him. Much too good for him. I should bedelighted if the beautiful young man took her from under his nose.'

'Somehow I can't see your "beautiful young man" in the rôle of husband,whereas Walter will make a very good one.'

'My good man, Walter will broadcast about it. All about their children,and the shelves he has put up in the pantry, and how the little woman'sbulbs are coming along, and the frost patterns on the nursery window.She'd be much safer with—what did you say his name was?'

'Searle. Leslie Searle.' Absentmindedly he watched the pale yellow neonsignature of Laurent's coming nearer.

'I don't think safe is the adjective I would apply to Searle, somehow,' hesaid reflectively; and from that moment forgot all about Leslie Searleuntil the day when he was sent down to Salcott St Mary to search for theyoung man's body.

2

'Daylight!' said Liz, coming out on to the pavement. 'Good cleandaylight.' She sniffed the afternoon air with pleasure. 'The car is roundthe corner in the square. Do you know London well, Mr—Mr Searle?'

'I've been in England for holidays quite often, yes. Not often as early inthe year as this, though.'

'You haven't seen England at all unless you have seen it in the spring.'

'So I've heard.'

'Did you fly over?'

'Just from Paris, like a good American. Paris is fine in the spring too.'

'So I've heard,' she said, returning his phrase and his tone. And then,finding the eye he turned on her intimidating, went on: 'Are you ajournalist? Is that how you knew Cooney Wiggin?'

'No, I'm in the same line as Cooney was.'

'Press photography?'

'Not Press. Just photography. I spend most of the winter on the Coast,doing people.'

'The Coast?'

'California. That keeps me on good terms with my bank manager. And theother half of the year I travel and photograph the things I want tophotograph.'

'It sounds a good sort of life,' Liz said, as she unlocked the car door andgot in.

'It's a very good life.'

The car was a two-seater Rolls; a little old-fashioned in shape as Rollscars, which last for ever, are apt to be. Liz explained it as they droveout of the square into the stream of the late afternoon traffic.

'The first thing Aunt Lavinia did when she made money was to buy herself asable scarf. She had always thought a sable scarf the last word in gooddressing. And the second thing she wanted was a Rolls. She got that withher next book. She never wore the scarf at all because she said it was adreadful nuisance to have something dangling about her all the time, butthe Rolls was a great success so we still have it.'

'What happened to the sable scarf?'

'She swopped it for a pair of Queen Anne chairs and a lawn-mower.'

As they came to rest in front of the hotel she said: 'They won't let mewait here. I'll go over to the parking place and wait for you.'

'But aren't you going to pack for me?'

'Pack for you? Certainly not.'

'But your aunt said you were to.'

'That was a mere figure of speech.'

'Not the way I figure it. Anyhow, come up and watch while I pack. Lend meyour advice and countenance. It's a nice countenance.'

In the end it was actually Liz who packed the things into his two cases,while he took them out of the drawers and tossed them over to her. Theywere all very expensive things, she observed; custom-made of the bestmaterials.

'Are you very rich, or just very extravagant?' she asked.

'Fastidious, let us say.'

By the time they left the hotel the first street lamps were decorating thedaylight.

'This is when I think lights look best,' Liz said. 'While it is stilldaylight. They are daffodil yellow and magic. Presently when it grows darkthey will go white and ordinary.'

They drove back to Bloomsbury only to find that Miss Fitch had gone. TheRoss part of the firm, sprawled in large exhaustion in a chair andthoughtfully consuming what was left of the sherry, roused himself to ashadow of his professional bonhomie to say that Miss Fitch had decided thatthere would be more room in Mr Whitmore's car and had gone over to thestudio to pick him up when he had finished his half-hour. Miss Garrowby andMr Searle were to follow them down to Salcott St Mary.

Searle was silent as they made their way out of London; from deference tothe driver, Liz supposed, and liked him for it. It was not until greenfields appeared on either hand that he began to talk about Walter. Cooney,it seemed, had thought a lot of Walter.

'You weren't in the Balkans with Cooney Wiggin, then?'

'No, I knew Cooney back in the States. But he wrote me a lot in lettersabout your cousin.'

'That was nice of him. But Walter isn't my cousin, you know.'

'Not? But Miss Fitch is your aunt, isn't she?'

'No. I'm no relation to any of them. Lavinia's sister—Emma—married myfather when I was little. That's all. Mother—Emma, that is—practicallysurrounded him, if the truth must be told. He didn't have a chance. Yousee, she brought up Lavinia, and it was a frightful shock to her whenVinnie upped and did something on her own. Especially anything so outré asbecoming a best-seller. Emma looked round to see what else she could layhands on that would do to go broody about, and there was Father, strandedwith a baby daughter, and simply asking to be arrested. So she became EmmaGarrowby, and my mother. I never think of her as my "step", because I don'tremember any other. When my father died, mother came to live at Trimmingswith Aunt Lavinia, and when I left school I took over the job of hersecretary. Hence the line about packing for you.'

'And Walter? Where does he come in?'

'He is the eldest sister's son. His parents died in India and Aunt Laviniahas brought him up since then. I mean, since he was fifteen, or so.'

He was silent for a little, evidently disentangling this in his mind.

Why had she told him that, she wondered? Why had she told him that hermother was possessive; even if she had made it clear that she waspossessive in the very nicest way? Was it possible that she was nervous?She, who was never nervous and never chattered. What was there to benervous about? There was surely nothing disconcerting in the presence of agood-looking young man. Both as Liz Garrowby and as Miss Lavinia Fitch'ssecretary she had entertained a great many good-looking young men in hertime, and had not been (as far as she could remember) greatly impressed.

She turned from the black polished surface of the arterial road into aside one. The last raw scar of new development had faded behind them, andthey were now in an altogether country world. The little lanes ran in andout of each other, anonymous and irrelevant, and Liz picked the ones shewanted without hesitation.

'How do you choose?' Searle asked. 'All these little dirt roads look aliketo me.'

'They look alike to me too. But I have done this trip so often that myhands do it for me, the way my fingers know the keys of a typewriter. Icouldn't repeat the keys of a typewriter by trying to visualise them, butmy fingers know where each key is. Do you know this part of the world?'

'No, this is new to me.'

'It's a dull county, I think. Quite featureless. Walter says that it is aconstant permutation of the same seven "props": six trees and a haystack.Indeed he says that there is a phrase in the county regiment's officialmarch that says quite plainly: Six trees and a hay-stack!' She sang thephrase for him. 'But where you see the bump in the road is the beginning ofOrfordshire, and that is much more satisfying.'

Orfordshire was in truth a satisfactory stretch of territory. In thegrowing dusk its lines flowed together in ever-changing combinations thatwere dream-like in their perfection. Presently they paused on the lip of ashallow valley and looked down on the dark smudge of roofs and thescattered lights of a village.

'Salcott St Mary,' Liz said, introducing it. 'A once beautiful Englishvillage that is now occupied territory.'

'Occupied by whom?'

'By what the remaining natives call "they artist folk". It is very sad forthem, poor things. They took Aunt Lavinia in their stride, because she wasthe owner of the "big house" and not part of their actual lives at all. Andshe has been here so long that she is almost beginning to belong. The bighouse has never been part of the village in the last hundred years, anyhow,so it didn't matter much who lived in it. The rot started when the millhouse fell vacant, and some firm was going to buy it for a factory. I mean:to turn it into a factory. Then Marta Hallard heard about it and bought itto live in, right under the various lawyers' noses, and everyone wasdelighted and thought they were saved. They didn't much want an actresscreature living in the mill house, but at least they weren't after all tohave a factory in their nice village. Poor darlings, if they could onlyhave foreseen.'

She set the car in motion, and drove slowly along the slope, parallel withthe village.

'I take it there was a sheep-track from London to here in about sixmonths,' Searle said.

'How did you know?'

'I see it all the time on the Coast. Someone finds a good quiet spot, andbefore they've got the plumbing fixed they're being asked to vote formayor.'

'Yes. Every third cottage in the place has an alien in it. All degrees ofwealth, from Toby Tullis—the play-*wright, you know—who has a lovelyJacobean house in the middle of the village street, to Serge Ratoff thedancer who lives in a converted stable. All degrees of living in sin, fromDeenie Paddington who never has the same weekend guest twice, to poor oldAtlanta Hope and Bart Hobart who have been living in sin, bless them, forthe best part of thirty years. All degrees of talent from Silas Weekley,who writes those dark novels of country life, all steaming manure andslashing rain, to Miss Easton-Dixon who writes a fairy-tale book once ayear for the Christmas trade.'

'It sounds lovely,' Searle said.

'It's obscene,' Liz said, more hotly than she intended; and then wonderedagain why she should be so on edge this evening. 'And talking of theobscene,' she said, pulling herself together, 'I'm afraid it is too darkfor you to appreciate Trimmings, but the full flavour of it can keep tillthe morning. You can just get the general effect against the sky.'

She waited while the young man took in the frieze of dark pinnacles andcrenellations against the evening sky. 'The special gem is the Gothicconservatory, which you can't see in this light.'

'Why did Miss Fitch choose this?' Searle asked in wonder.

'Because she thought it was grand,' Liz said, her voice warm withaffection. 'She was brought up in a rectory, you know; the kind of rectorythat was built circa 1850; so her eye became conditioned to VictorianGothic. Even now, you know, she doesn't honestly see what is wrong with it.She knows people laugh at it, and she is quite philosophical about it, butshe doesn't really know why they laugh. When she first brought Cormac Ross,her publisher, here, he complimented her on the appropriateness of thename, and she had no idea what he was talking about.'

'Well, I'm in no mood to be critical, even of Victorian Gothic,' the youngman said. 'It was extraordinarily nice of Miss Fitch to have me down herewithout even stopping to look me up in the reference books. Somehow over inthe States we expect more caution from the English.'

'It isn't a matter of caution with the English; it's a matter of domesticcalculation. Aunt Lavinia asked you down on the spur of the moment becauseshe didn't have to do any domestic reckoning. She knows that there isenough spare linen to furnish a spare bed, and enough food in the house tofeed a guest, and enough "labour" to provide for his comfort, and so shehas no need to hesitate. Do you mind if we go straight round to the garageand take your things in through the side door. It's a day's march to thefront door from the domestics' quarters, the baronial hall unfortunatelyintervening.'

'Who built this and why?' Searle asked, looking up at the bulk of the houseas they skirted it.

'A man from Bradford, I understand. There was a very pleasant earlyGeorgian house on the spot—there is a print of it in the gun-room—but hethought it a poor-looking object and pulled it down.'

So it was through ugly passages, dimly lit, that Searle carried hisluggage; passages that Liz said always reminded her of boarding-school.

'Just drop them there,' she said, indicating a service stair, 'and someonewill take them up presently. Come through now to comparative civilisationand get warm and have a drink and meet Walter.'

She pushed open a baize door and led him into the front of the house.

'Do you roller-skate?' he asked, as they crossed the meaningless spaces ofthe hall.

Liz said that she hadn't thought of it, but that the place was, of course,useful for dances. 'The local hunt use it once a year,' she said. 'Thoughyou mightn't think it, it's less draughty than the Corn Exchange inWickham.'

She opened a door and they went from the grey spaces of Orfordshire and thedreary dim corridors of the house into warmth and firelight and the welcomeof a lived-in room full of well-used furniture and scented with burninglogs and narcissi. Lavinia was sunk in a chair with her neat little feet onthe edge of the steel fender and her untidy mop of hair escaping from itspins all over the cushions. Facing her, with his elbow on the mantelpieceand one foot on the fender in his favourite attitude, was Walter Whitmore,and Liz saw him with a rush of affection and relief.

Why relief? she asked herself, as she listened to the greetings. She hadknown Walter would be here. Why relief?

Was it just that she could now hand over the social burden to Walter?

But social duties were her daily task and she took them in her stride. Norcould Searle be justly considered a burden. She had rarely met anyone soeasy or so undemanding. Why this gladness to see Walter, this absurdfeeling that now it would be all right? Like a child coming back fromstrangeness to a familiar room.

She watched the pleasure on Walter's face as he welcomed Searle; and lovedhim. He was human, and imperfect, and his face was already growing lined,and his hair showed signs of growing back above the temples, but he wasWalter, and real; not—not something of inhuman beauty that had walked outof some morning of the world beyond our remembering.

She took pleasure in remarking that, face to face with Walter's tallness,the newcomer looked nearly short. And his shoes, for all theirexpensiveness were, from an English point of view, distinctly regrettable.

'After all, he's only a photographer,' she said to herself, and was caughtup by her own absurdity.

Was she so impressed by Leslie Searle that she needed protection againsthim? Surely not.

It was not uncommon to find that morning-of-the-world beauty among northernpeoples; nor was it to be wondered at that it made one think of tales ofthe seal people and their strangeness. The young man was just agood-looking Scandinavian-American with a deplorable taste in shoes and atalent for using the right kind of lens. There was not the slightest needfor her to cross herself, or utter charms against him.

Even so, when her mother asked him at dinner whether he had any family inEngland, she was conscious of a vague surprise that he should be possessedof anything so mundane as relations.

He had a girl cousin, he said; that was all.

'We don't like each other. She paints.'

'Is the painting a non-sequitur?' Walter asked.

'Oh, I like her painting well enough—what I've seen of it. It's just thatwe annoy each other, so we don't bother with one another.'

Lavinia asked what she painted; was it portraits?

Liz wondered, while they talked, if she had ever painted her cousin. Itmust be nice to be able to take a brush and a box of paints and put onrecord for one's own pleasure and satisfaction a beauty that couldotherwise never belong to one. To have it to keep and look at whenever onewanted to until one died.

'Elizabeth Garrowby!' she said to herself. 'In no time at all you will behanging up actor's photographs.'

But no; it wasn't like that at all. It was no more reprehensible thanloving a—than admiring a work of Praxiteles. If Praxiteles had everdecided to immortalise a hurdler, the hurdler would have looked just likeLeslie Searle. She must ask him sometime where he went to school, and if hehad ever run races over hurdles.

She was a little sorry to see that her mother did not like Searle. No onewould ever suspect it, of course; but Liz knew her mother very well andcould gauge with micrometer accuracy her secret reactions to any givensituation. She was aware now of the distrust that seethed and bubbledbehind that bland front, as lava seethes and bubbles behind the smilingslopes of Vesuvius.

In that she was, of course, right. When Walter had borne his guest away toshow him his room, and Liz had gone to tidy for dinner, Mrs Garrowby hadcatechised her sister about this unknown quantity that she had unloaded onthe household.

'How do you know that he ever knew Cooney Wiggin at all?' she asked.

'If he didn't, Walter will soon find out,' Lavinia said reasonably. 'Don'tbother me, Em. I'm tired. It was an awful party. Everyone screaming theirheads off.'

'If his little plan is to burgle Trimmings, it will be too late tomorrowmorning for Walter to find out that he didn't know Cooney at all. Anyonecould say they knew Cooney. If it comes to that, anyone could say they knewCooney and get away with it. There was practically no part of CooneyWiggin's life that wasn't public property.'

'I can't think why you should be so suspicious about him. We have often hadpeople we didn't know anything about down here at a moment's notice——'

'Indeed we have,' Emma said grimly.

'And so far they have always been what they said they were. Why pick on MrSearle for your suspicions?'

'He is much too personable to be wholesome.'

It was typical of Emma to shy at the word 'beauty', and to substitute abastard compromise like 'personable'.

Lavinia pointed out that since Mr Searle was staying only till Monday theamount of unwholesomeness he could manage to disseminate was necessarilysmall.

'And if it is burglary you are thinking of, he's going to have a sad shockwhen he goes through Trimmings. I can't think, off-hand, of anything thatis worth lugging as far as Wickham.'

'There's the silver.'

'Somehow I can't believe that anyone went to all the trouble of appearingat Cormac's party, and pretending to know Cooney, and asking for Walter,just to obtain possession of a couple of dozen forks, some spoons, and asalver. Why not just force a lock one dark night?'

Mrs Garrowby looked unconvinced.

'It must be very useful to have someone who is dead when you want to beintroduced to a family.'

'Oh, Em,' Lavinia had said, breaking into laughter as much at the sentenceas at the sentiment.

So Mrs Garrowby sat and brooded darkly behind her gracious exterior. Shewas not afraid for the Trimmings silver, of course. She was afraid of whatshe called the young man's 'personableness.' She distrusted it for itself,and hated it as a potential threat to her house.

3

But Emma did not, as MartaHallard had prophesied, get the young man out of the house first thingon Monday morning. By Monday morning it was incredible to theinhabitants of Trimmings—all but Emma herself—that on theprevious Friday they had never heard of Leslie Searle. There had neverbeen any guest at Trimmings who had merged himself with the householdas Searle did. Nor had there ever been anyone who intensified the lifeof each one of them to the same extent.

He walked round the farm with Walter, admiring the new brick paths, thepiggery, and the separator. He had spent his school holidays on a farm,and was knowledgeable as well as receptive. He stood patiently in greenlanes while Walter recorded in his little notebook a hedgerow sprout or abird-note that would do for his broadcast next Friday. He photographedwith equal enthusiasm the seventeenth-century honesty of the littlefarmhouse, and the surrealist irrelevance of Trimmings, and contrived toconvey the essential quality of each. Indeed, his photographic comment onTrimmings was so witty that Walter after his involuntary laughter had amoment of discomfort. This amiable young man had more sides to him thanwere apparent in a discussion on husbandry. He had so taken for grantedthe boy's discipleship that it was as disconcerting to look at thesephotographs as if his shadow had suddenly spoken to him.

But he forgot the moment almost before it had passed. He was not anintrospective person.

For the introspective Liz, on the other hand, life had become all of asudden a sort of fun-fair. A kaleidoscope. A place where no surface everstayed still or horizontal for more than a few seconds together. Where onewas plunged into swift mock danger and whirled about in coloured lights.Liz had been falling in and out of love more or less regularly since theage of seven, but she had never wanted to marry anyone but Walter. Who wasWalter, and different. But never in that long progression from the baker'sroundsman to Walter had she been aware of anyone as she was aware ofSearle. Even with Tino Tresca, of the yearning eyes and the tenor thatdissolved one's heart like a melting ice, even with Tresca, craziest ofall her devotions, it was possible to forget for minutes together that shewas in the same room with him. (With Walter, of course, there was nothingremarkable in the fact that they should be sharing the same air: he wasjust there and it was nice.) But it was never possible to forget thatSearle was in a room.

Why? she kept asking herself. Or rather, why not?

It had nothing to do with falling in love, this interest; this excitement.If, on Sunday night, after two days in his company, he had turned to herand said: 'Come away with me, Liz,' she would have laughed aloud at soabsurd a notion. She had no desire to go away with him.

But a light went out of the room with him, and sprang up again when hecame back. She was aware of every movement of his, from the small malletof his forefinger as it flicked the radio switch, to the lift of his footas it kicked a log in the fireplace.

Why?

She had gone walking with him through the woods, she had shown him thevillage and the church, and always the excitement had been there; in hisgentle drawling courtesy, and in those disconcerting grey eyes that seemedto know too much about her. For Liz, all American men were divided intotwo classes: those who treated you as if you were a frail old lady, andthose who treated you as if you were just frail. Searle belonged to thefirst class. He helped her over stiles, and shielded her from the crowdingdangers of the village street; he deferred to her opinion and flatteredher ego; and, as a mere change from Walter, Liz found it pleasant. Waltertook it for granted that she was adult enough to look after herself, butnot quite adult enough to be consulted by Walter Whitmore, Household WordThroughout the British Isles and a Large Part of Overseas. Searle's was acharming reversal of form.

She had thought, watching him move slowly round the interior of thechurch, what a perfect companion he would have made if it were not forthis pricking excitement; this sense of wrongness.

Even the unimpressionable Lavinia, always but semi-detached from hercurrent heroine, was, Liz noticed, touched by this strange attraction.Searle had sat with her on the terrace after dinner on Saturday night,while Walter and Liz walked in the garden and Emma attended to householdmatters. As they passed below the terrace each time on their round of thegarden, Liz could hear her aunt's light childlike voice babbling happily,like a little stream in the half-dark of the early moonrise. And on Sundaymorning Lavinia had confided to Liz that no one had ever made her feel soabandoned as Mr Searle. 'I am sure that he was something very wicked inAncient Greece,' she said. And had added with a giggle: 'But don't tellyour mother that I said so!'

Against the entrenched opposition of her sister, her nephew, and herdaughter, Mrs Garrowby would have found it difficult to rid Trimmings ofthe young man's presence; but her final undoing came at the hands of MissEaston-Dixon.

Miss Easton-Dixon lived in a tiny cottage on the slope behind the villagestreet. It had three windows, asymmetrical in their own right and inrelation to each other, a thatched roof, and a single chimney, and itlooked as if one good sneeze would bring the whole thing round theoccupant's ears; but its aspect of disintegration was equalled only by itsspick and span condition. The cream wash of the plaster, the lime-greenpaint of door and windows, the dazzling crispness of the muslin curtains,the swept condition of the red-brick path, together with the almostconscientious crookedness of everything that normally would be straight,made a picture that belonged by right to one of Miss Easton-Dixon's ownfairytale books for Christmas.

In the intervals of writing her annual story, Miss Easton-Dixon indulgedin handcrafts. In the schoolroom she had tortured wood with red-hotpokers. When pen-painting came in she had pen-painted with assiduity, andhad graduated from that to barbola work. After a spell of sealing-wax, shehad come to raffia, and thence to hand-weaving. She still weaved now andthen, but her ingrained desire was not to create but to transform. Noplain surface was safe against Miss Easton-Dixon. She would take a coldcream jar and reduce its functional simplicity to a nightmare ofmock-Meissen. In times which have seen the disappearance of both the atticand the boxroom, she was the scourge of her friends; who, incidentally,loved her.

As well as being a prop of the Women's Rural Institute, a lavish providerof goods for bazaars, a devoted polisher of Church plate, MissEaston-Dixon was also an authority on Hollywood and all its ramifications.Every Thursday she took the one o'clock bus into Wickham and spent theafternoon having one-and-ninepence-worth at the converted Followers ofMoses hall that did duty as a cinema. If the week's film happened to besomething of which she did not approve—ukelele opus, for instance, or thetribulations of some blameless housemaid—she put the one-and-ninepence,together with the eight-penny bus fare, into the china pig on themantelpiece, and used the fund to take her to Crome, when some film thatshe specially looked forward to was being shown in that comparativemetropolis.

Every Friday she collected her Screen Bulletin from the newsagent in thevillage, read through the releases for the week, marked those she intendedto view, and put away the paper for future reference. There was no bitplayer in two hemispheres that Miss Easton-Dixon could not give chapterand verse for. She could tell you why the make-up expert at GrandContinental had gone over to Wilhelm's, and the exact difference that hadmade to Madeleine Rice's left profile.

So that poor Emma, walking up the spotless brick path to hand in a basketof eggs on her way to Evensong, was walking all unaware into her Waterloo.

Miss Easton-Dixon asked about the party to celebrate the birth ofMaureen's Lover and Lavinia Fitch's literary coming-of-age. Had it beena success?

Emma supposed so. Ross and Cromarty's parties always were. A sufficiencyof drink was all that was ever necessary to make a party a success.

'I hear that you have a very good-looking guest this weekend,' MissEaston-Dixon said, less because she was curious than because it wasagainst her idea of good manners to have gaps in the conversation.

'Yes. Lavinia brought him back from the party. A person called Searle.'

'Oh,' said Miss Easton-Dixon in absentminded encouragement, while shetransferred the eggs to a tenpenny white bowl that she had painted withpoppies and corn.

'An American. He says that he is a photographer. Anyone who takesphotographs can say that he is a photographer and there is no one to denyit. It is a very useful profession. Almost as useful as "nurse" used to bebefore it became a matter of registration and reference books.'

'Searle?' Miss Easton-Dixon said, pausing with an egg in her hand. 'NotLeslie Searle, by any chance?'

'Yes,' said Emma, taken aback. 'His name is Leslie. At least that is whathe says. Why?'

'You mean Leslie Searle is here? In Salcott St Mary? How simplyunbelievable!'

'What is unbelievable about it?' Emma said, on the defensive.

'But he is famous.'

'So are half the residents of Salcott St Mary,' Emma reminded her tartly.

'Yes, but they don't photograph the most exclusive people in the world. Doyou know that Hollywood stars go down on their knees to get Leslie Searleto photograph them? It is something that they can't buy. A privilege. Anhonour.'

'And, I take it, an advertisement,' said Emma. 'Are we talking about thesame Leslie Searle, do you think?'

'But of course! There can hardly be two Leslie Searles who are Americanand photographers.'

'I see nothing impossible in that,' said Emma, a last-ditcher by nature.

'But of course it must be the Leslie Searle. If it won't make you latefor Evensong we can settle the matter here and now.'

'How?'

'I have a photograph of him somewhere.'

'Of Leslie Searle!'

'Yes. In a Screen Bulletin. Just let me look it out; it won't take amoment. This really is exciting. I can't think of anyone more—moreexotic—to find in Salcott of all places.' She opened the door of ayellow-painted cupboard (decorated Bavarian-fashion with scrolls ofstylised flowers) and disclosed the neat stacks of hoarded Bulletins.'Let me see. It must be eighteen months ago—or perhaps two years.' With apractised hand she thumbed down the edges of the pile, so that the date inthe corner of each was visible for a moment, and picked two or three fromthe pile. 'There is a "contents" list on the outside of each,' she pointedout, shuffling them on the table, 'so it doesn't take a moment to findwhat one wants. So useful.' And then, as the required issue did not turnup at once: 'But if this is going to make you late, do leave it and comein on your way home. I shall look it out while you are in church.'

But nothing would now have moved Emma from the house until she had seenthat photograph.

'Ah, here it is!' said Miss Easton-Dixon at last. '"Lovelies And The Lens"it was called. I suppose one cannot expect style and information forthreepence a week. However, if I remember rightly the article was morerespect-worthy than the title. Here it is. These are samples of hiswork—that is a very clever one of Lotta Marlow, isn't it—and here,over the page, you see, is a self-portrait. Isn't that your weekendguest?'

It was a photograph taken at an odd angle and full of odd shadows; acomposition rather than a 'likeness' in the old sense. But it wasunmistakably Leslie Searle. The Leslie Searle who was occupying the'tower' bedroom at Trimmings. Unless, of course, there were twins, bothcalled Leslie, both called Searle, both Americans, and both photographers;which was something at which even Emma baulked.

She skimmed through the article, which, as Miss Easton-Dixon hadindicated, was a perfectly straight-forward account of the young man andhis work and might equally well have come out of Theatre Arts Monthly.The article welcomed him back to the Coast for his annual stay, envied himbeing free of the world for the rest of the year, and commended his newportraits of the stars, more especially that of Danny Minsky in Hamletclothes. 'The tears of laughter that Danny has wrung from us have no doubtblinded us to that Forbes-Robertson profile. It took Searle to show usthat,' they said.

'Yes,' said Emma, 'that's——' She had nearly said 'the creature' butstopped herself in time; 'that is the same person.'

No, she said cautiously, she did not know how long he was staying—he wasLavinia's guest—but Miss Easton-Dixon should certainly meet him before heleft if that were humanly possible.

'If not,' said Miss Easton-Dixon, 'do please tell him how much I admirehis work.'

But that, of course, Emma had no intention of doing. She was not going tomention this little matter at home at all. She went to Evensong and sat inthe Trimmings pew looking placid and benevolent and being thoroughlymiserable. The creature was not only 'personable', he was a personality,and by that much more dangerous. He had a reputation that for all she knewmight vie with Walter's in worldly worth. He no doubt had money, too. Itwas bad enough when she had only his 'personableness' to fear; now itturned out that he was eligible as well. He had everything on his side.

If it had been possible to call up the powers of darkness against him, shewould have done it. But she was in church and must use the means to hand.So she invoked God and all his angels to guard her Liz against the evilsin her path; that is to say, against not inheriting Lavinia's fortune whenthe time came. 'Keep her true to Walter,' she prayed, 'and I'll——.' Shetried to think of some bribe or penance that she could offer, but couldthink of none at the moment, so she merely repeated: 'Keep her true toWalter,' with no inducement added and left it to the unselfish goodnessof the Deity.

It did nothing to reassure her nor to bolster her faith in the Deity, tocome on her daughter and Searle leaning on the little side gate into theTrimmings garden and laughing together like a pair of children. She cameup behind them along the field path from the church, and was dismayed bysome quality of loveliness, of youth, that belonged to their gaiety. Aquality that was not apparent in any communion between Liz and Walter.

'What I like best is the yard or two of Renaissance before the bit ofBorder peel,' Liz was saying. They were evidently at their favourite gameof making fun of the Bradford magnate's folly.

'How did he forget a moat, do you think?' Searle asked.

'Perhaps he started life digging ditches and didn't want to be reminded ofthem.'

'It's my guess he didn't want to spend money on digging a hole just to putwater in it. They're Yankees, aren't they, up there?'

Liz 'allowed' that north-country blood had probably much in common withNew England. Then Searle saw Emma and greeted her, and they walked up tothe house with her, not self-conscious in her presence or stopping theirgame, but drawing her into it and sharing their delight with her.

She looked at Liz's sallow little countenance and tried to remember whenshe had last seen it so alive; so full of the joy of life. After a littleshe remembered. It was on a Christmas afternoon long ago, and Liz hadexperienced in the short space of an hour her first snow and her firstChristmas tree.

So far she had hated only Leslie Searle's beauty. Now she began to hateLeslie Searle.

4

It was Emma's hope that Searle would go quietly away before any furtherevidences of desirableness were revealed to the family; but in that tooshe was bound to be frustrated. Searle had avowedly come to England for aholiday, he had no relations or intimate friends to visit, he had a cameraand every intention of using it, and there seemed no reason why he shouldnot stay at Trimmings and use it. His expressed intention, once he hadseen the largely unspoiled loveliness of Orfordshire, was to find a goodhotel in Crome and make that a centre for photographic foraging among thecottages and country houses of the neighbourhood. But that, as Laviniaswiftly pointed out, was absurd. He could stay at Trimmings, among hisfriends, and forage just as far afield and with as good results as hecould at Crome. Why should he come back each night to a hotel room and thecompany of casual acquaintances in a hotel lounge, when he could return toa home and the comfort of his own room in the tower?

Searle would no doubt have accepted the invitation in any case, but thefinal makeweight was the suggestion that he and Walter might do a booktogether. No one could remember afterwards who first made the suggestion,but it was one that anyone might have made. It was from journalism thatWalter had graduated to the eminence of radio commentator, and an alliancebetween one of Britain's best-known personalities and one of America'smost admired photographers would produce a book that might, with luck,have equal interest for Weston-super-Mare and Lynchburg, Va. Inpartnership they could clean up.

So there was no question of Searle's departing on Monday morning, nor onTuesday, nor on any specific day in a foreseeable future. He was atTrimmings to stay, it seemed. And no one but Emma found any fault withthat arrangement. Lavinia offered him the use of her Rolls two-seater totake him round the country—it did nothing but lie in the garage, shesaid, when she was working—but Searle preferred to hire a small cheap carfrom Bill Maddox, who kept the garage at the entrance to the village. 'IfI'm going nosing up lanes that are not much better than the bed of astream, some of them, I want a car I don't have to hold my breath about,'he said. But Liz felt that this was merely a way of declining Lavinia'soffer gracefully, and liked him for it.

Bill Maddox reported well of him to the village—'no airs at all and can'tbe fooled neither; upped with the bonnet and went over her as if he wasbred to the trade'—so that by the time he appeared in the Swan withWalter of an evening Salcott St Mary knew all about him and were preparedto accept him in spite of his reprehensible good looks. The Salcottaliens, of course, had no prejudice against good looks and no hesitationwhatever in accepting him. Toby Tullis took one look at him andstraightway forgot his royalties, the new comedy he had just finished, theone he had just begun, and the infidelity of Christopher Hatton (how hadhe ever been such a half-wit as to trust a creature of a vanity sopathological that he could take to himself a name like that!) and made abee-line for the bench where Walter had deposited Searle while he fetchedthe beer.

'I think I saw you at Lavinia's party in town,' he said, in his bestimitation-tentative manner. 'My name is Tullis. I write plays.' Themodesty of this phrase always enchanted him. It was as if the owner of atranscontinental railroad were to say: 'I run trains.'

'How do you do, Mr Tullis,' said Leslie Searle. 'What kind of plays do youwrite?'

There was a moment of silence while Tullis got his breath back, and whilehe was still searching for words Walter came up with the beer.

'Well,' he said, 'I see you have introduced yourselves.'

'Walter,' said Tullis, deciding on his line and leaning towards Walterwith empressement, 'I have met him!'

'Met whom?' asked Walter who always remembered his accusatives.

'The man who never heard of me. I have met him at last!'

'And how does it feel?' asked Walter, glancing at Searle and deciding yetonce again that there was more in Leslie Searle than met the eye.

'Wonderful, my boy, wonderful. A unique sensation.'

'If you care, his name is Searle. Leslie Searle. A friend of CooneyWiggin.'

Walter saw a shadow of doubt cross the fish-grey eye of Toby Tullis andfollowed the thought quite clearly. If this beautiful young man had been afriend of the very-international Cooney, then was it possible that he hadnever heard of the even-more-international Toby Tullis? Was it possiblethat the young man was taking him for a ride?

Walter set the beer mugs down, slid into the seat beside Searle, andprepared to enjoy himself.

Across the room he could see Serge Ratoff glaring at this new piece ofgrouping. Ratoff had at one time been the raison d'être and prospectivestar of an embryo play of Toby Tullis's which was to be called Afternoonand was all about a faun. Unfortunately it had suffered considerablechanges in the processes of birth and had eventually become somethingcalled Crépuscule, which was all about a little waiter in the Bois, andwas played by a newcomer with an Austrian name and a Greek temperament.Ratoff had never recovered from this 'betrayal'. At first he had drunkhimself into scintillations of self-pity; then he had drunk to avoid theache of self-pity that filled him when he was sober; then he was sackedbecause he had become independable both at rehearsals and performance;then he reached the ultimate stage of a ballet dancer's downfall andceased even to practise. So that now, vaguely but surely, the fatty tissuewas blurring the spare tautness. Only the furious eyes still had the oldlife and fire. The eyes still had meaning and purpose.

When Toby ceased to invite him to the house at Salcott, Ratoff had boughtthe old stable next the village shop; a mere lean-to against the shop'sgable end; and made it into a dwelling for himself. This had proved in aquite unexpected way his salvation, for his point of vantage next the onlyshop in the place had turned him from a mere reject of Toby's into ageneral purveyer of gossip to the community, and therefore a person in hisown right. The villagers, lured by the childish quality in his make-up,treated him without the reservation that they used to the other aliens,employing to him the same tolerance that they used to their own'innocents'. He was therefore the only person in the village who wasequally free of both communities. No one knew what he lived on, or if heever ate, as opposed to drinking. At almost any hour of the day he couldbe found draped in incorrigible grace against the post-office counter ofthe shop, and in the evenings he drank at the Swan like the rest of thecommunity.

In the last few months a rapprochement had taken place between him andToby, and there were rumours that he was even beginning to practise again.Now he was glaring at this newcomer to Salcott, this unsmirched unblurredradiant newcomer, who had taken Toby's interest. In spite of 'betrayal'and downfall, Toby was still his property and his god. Walter thought witha mild amusement how scandalised poor Serge would be if he could witnessthe treatment to which his adored Toby was being subjected. Toby had bynow discovered that Leslie Searle was a fellow who photographed theworld's celebrities, and was therefore confirmed in his suspicion thatSearle had known quite well who he was. He was puzzled, not to saywounded. No one had been rude to Toby Tullis for at least a decade. Buthis actor's need to be liked was stronger than his resentment, and he wasputting forth all his charm in an effort to win over this so-unexpectedantagonist.

Sitting watching the charm at work, Walter thought how ineradicable wasthe 'bounder' in a man's personality. When he was a child his friends atschool had used the word 'bounder' loosely to describe anyone who wore thewrong kind of collar. But of course it was not at all like that. What madea man a bounder was a quality of mind. A crassness. A lack of sensitivity.It was something that was quite incurable; a spiritual astigmatism. AndToby Tullis, after all those years, stayed unmistakably a bounder. It wasa very odd thing. With the possible exception of the Court of St James's,there was no door in the world that was not wide open to Toby Tullis. Hetravelled like royalty and was given almost diplomatic privileges; he wasdressed by the world's best tailors and had acquired the social tricks ofthe world's best people; in everything but essence he was the well-bredman of the world. In essence he remained a bounder. Marta Hallard had oncesaid: 'Everything that Toby does is just a little off-key,' and thatdescribed it very well.

Looking sideways to see how Searle was taking this odd wooing, Walter wasdelighted to observe a sort of absentmindedness in Searle as he consumedhis beer. The degree of absentmindedness was beautifully graded, Walternoticed; any more would have laid him open to the charge of rudeness andso put him in the wrong, any less might not have been obvious enough tosting Tullis. As it was, Toby was baffled into trying far too hard andmaking a fool of himself. He did everything but juggle with plates. Thatanyone should be unimpressed by Toby Tullis was a state of affairs not tobe borne. He sweated. And Walter smiled into his beer, and Leslie Searlewas gentle and polite and a little absentminded.

And Serge Ratoff continued to glare from the other side of the room.

Walter reckoned that he was two drinks short of making a scene, andwondered if they should drink up and go, before Serge joined them in atorrent of unintelligible English and unfathomable accusations. But theperson who joined them was not Serge but Silas Weekley.

Weekley had been watching them from the bar for some time, and now broughthis beer over to their table and greeted them. He came, as Walter knew,for two reasons: because he had a woman's curiosity, and becauseeverything beautiful had for him the attraction of the repulsive. Weekleyresented beauty, and it was not entirely to be held against him that hemade a very large income indeed out of that resentment. His resentment wasquite genuine. The world he approved of was, as Liz had said, 'allsteaming manure and slashing rain'. And not even the clever parodies ofhis individual style had sufficed to ruin his vogue. His lecture tours inAmerica were wild successes, not so much because his earnest readers inPeoria and Paduca loved steaming manure but because Silas Weekley lookedthe part so perfectly. He was cadaverous, and dark, and tall, and hisvoice was slow and sibilant and hopeless, and all the good ladies ofPeoria and Paduca longed to take him home and feed him up and give him abrighter outlook on life. In which they were a great deal more generousthan his English colleagues; who considered him an unmitigated bore and abit of an ass. Lavinia always referred to him as 'that tiresome man whoalways tells you that he was at a board school', and held that he was justa little mad. (He, on his part, referred to her as 'the woman Fitch', asone speaking of a criminal.)

Weekley had come over to them because he could not keep away from thehateful beauty of Leslie Searle, and Walter caught himself wondering ifSearle knew it. For Searle, who had been all gentle indifference with theeager Toby, was now engaged in throwing a rope over the antagonisticSilas. Walter, watching the almost feminine dexterity of it, was willingto bet that in about fifteen minutes Searle would have Silas roped andhog-tied. He glanced at the big bland clock behind the bar and decided totime him.

Searle did it with five minutes to spare. In ten minutes he had Weekley,resentful and struggling, a prisoner in his toils. And the bewilderment inWeekley's sunken eyes was greater than ever the bewilderment in Toby'sfish-scale ones had been. Walter nearly laughed aloud.

And then Searle put the final touch of comedy to the act. At a moment whenboth Silas and Toby were doing their rival best to be entertaining, Searlesaid in his quiet drawl: 'Do forgive me, won't you, but I see a friend ofmine,' and got up without haste and walked away to join the friend at thebar. The friend was Bill Maddox, the garage keeper.

Walter buried his face in his beer mug and enjoyed the faces of hisfriends.

It was only afterwards, rolling it over in his mind to savour it, that avague discomfort pricked him. The fun had been so bland, so lightlyhandled, that its essential quality, its ruthlessness, had not beenapparent.

At the moment he was merely amused by the typical reactions of Searle'stwo victims. Silas Weekley gulped down what was left of his beer, pushedthe mug away from him with a gesture of self-disgust, and went out of thepub without a word. He was like a man fleeing from the memory of somefrowsy back-room embrace; a man sickened by his own succumbing. Walterwondered for a moment if Lavinia could possibly be right, and Weekley wasafter all a little mad.

Toby Tullis, on the other hand, had never known either retreat orself-disgust. Toby was merely deploying his forces for furthercampaigning.

'A little farouche, your young friend,' he remarked, his eye on Searle ashe talked to Bill Maddox at the bar.

Farouche was the last word that Walter would have used of Leslie Searlebut he understood that Toby must justify his temporary overthrow.

'You must bring him to see Hoo House.'

Hoo House was the beautiful stone building that stood so unexpectedly inSalcott's row of pink and cream and yellow gables. It had once been aninn; and before that, it was said, its stones had been part of an abbeyfarther down the valley. Now it was a show-piece of a quality so rare thatToby, who normally changed his dwelling-place (one could hardly say hishome) every second year, had refused all offers for it for several yearsnow.

'Is he staying long with you?'

Walter said that he and Searle planned to do a book together. They had notyet decided on the form of it.

'Gipsying Through Orfordshire?'

'Something like that. I do the spiel and Searle does the illustrations. Wehaven't thought of a good central theme yet.'

'A little early in the year to go gipsying.'

'Good for photography, though. Before the county becomes clotted withgreenery.'

'Perhaps your young friend would like to photograph Hoo House,' Toby said,picking up the two mugs and moving with admirable casualness to the barwith them.

Walter stayed where he was and wondered how many drinks Serge Ratoff hadhad since last he noticed him. He had been only two short of a row then,he had reckoned. Now he must be almost at explosion point.

Toby put the mugs on the counter, entered first into conversation with thelandlord, then with Bill Maddox, and so quite naturally with Searle again.It was dexterously done.

'You must come and see Hoo House,' Walter heard him say presently. 'It isvery beautiful. You might even like to photograph it.'

'Has it not been photographed?' asked Searle, surprised. It was quite aninnocent surprise; an astonishment that a thing so beautiful should beunrecorded. But what it conveyed to his hearers was: 'Is it possible thatany facet of Toby Tullis's life has remained unpublicised?'

This was the spark that ignited Serge.

'Yes!' he shrieked, shooting out of his corner like a squib and stickinghis furious small face within an inch of Searle's, 'it has beenphotographed! It has been photographed ten thousand times by the greatestphotographers in the world and it does not need to be made cheap by anystupid amateur from a country that was stolen from the Indians even if hehas a profile and dyed hair and no morals and a——'

'Serge!' said Toby, 'shut up!'

But the wild babble poured out of Serge's ravaged face without a pause.

'Serge! Do you hear! Stop it!' Toby said, and pushed Ratoff lightly on theshoulder so as to urge him away from Searle.

This was the final touch, and Serge's voice rose into one high continuousstream of vituperation, most of it couched in mercifully unintelligibleEnglish but spattered liberally with phrases in French or Spanish andstudded here and there with epithets and descriptions of a freshness thatwas delightful. 'You middle-west Lucifer!' was one of the better ones.

As Toby's hand took him by the back of the collar to drag him away fromSearle by force, Serge's arm shot out to where Toby's new-filled beer mugwas waiting on the counter. He reached it a split second before Reeve, thelandlord, could save it, grabbed it, and launched the whole contents intoSearle's face. Searle's head moved sideways by instinct, so that the beerstreamed over his neck and shoulder. Screaming with baffled rage, Sergelifted the heavy mug above his head to fling it, but Reeve's large handclosed on his wrist, the mug was prised out of his convulsive clutch, andReeve said: 'Arthur!'

There was no chucker-out at the Swan, since there had never been any needfor one. But when any persuading had to be done, Arthur Tebbetts did it.Arthur was cattleman up at Silverlace Farm, and he was a large, slow, kindcreature who would go out of his way to avoid treading on a worm.

'Come now, Mr Ratoff,' Arthur said, enveloping with his Saxon bulk thesmall struggling cosmopolitan. 'There's no call to get fussed over littlethings. It's that there gin, Mr Ratoff. I've told you afore. That ain't nodrink for a man, Mr Ratoff. Now you come with me, and see if you don'tfeel the better of a dose of fresh air. See if you don't.'

Serge had no intention of going anywhere with anyone. He wanted to stayand murder this newcomer to Salcott. But there was never any successfulargument against Arthur's methods. Arthur just put a friendly arm roundone and leaned. The arm was like a limb of a beech tree, and the pressurewas that of a landslide. Serge went with him to the door under pressure,and they went out together. Not for one moment had Serge stopped historrent of accusation and offence, and not once as far as anyone knew hadhe repeated himself.

As the high babbling voice died into the outer air, the onlookers stirredinto relief and conversation again.

'Gentlemen,' said Toby Tullis, 'I apologise on behalf of the Theatre.'

But it was not said lightly enough. Instead of being an actor's gaysmoothing over of an awkward moment, it was Toby Tullis reminding themthat he spoke for the English Theatre. As Marta had said: everything thatToby did was a little off-key. There was a murmur of amusement, but ifanything his speech added to the village's embarrassment.

The landlord mopped Searle's shoulder with a glass-cloth, and begged himto come in behind and his missus would take some clean water to his suitand get the smell of the beer off it before it dried in. But Searlerefused. He was quite amiable about it but seemed to want to get out ofthe place. Walter thought that he was looking a little sick.

They said good-evening to Toby, who was still explaining Serge'stemperament in terms of the Theatre, and went out into the sweet evening.

'Does he often sound off like that?' Searle asked.

'Ratoff? He has made scenes before, yes, but never such a violent one.I've never known him use physical means before.'

They met Arthur, returning to his interrupted beer, and Walter asked whathad become of the disturber.

'He run away home,' Arthur said with his large smile. 'Went off like anarrow from a bow. He could beat a hare, that one.' And went back to hisdrink.

'It's early for dinner yet,' Walter said. 'Let us walk home by the riverand up by the field-path. I am sorry about the row, but I expect that inyour job you are used to temperaments.'

'Well, I have been called things, of course, but so far nothing hasactually been flung at me.'

'I dare swear no one ever thought of calling you a middle-west Luciferbefore. Poor Serge.' Walter paused to lean on the bridge below the MillHouse, and look at the reflection of the afterglow in the waters of theRushmere. 'Perhaps the old saying is true and it is not possible to loveand be wise. When you are as devoted to anyone as Serge is to Toby Tullis,I expect you cease to be sane about the matter.'

'Sane,' said Searle sharply.

'Yes; things lose their proper proportions. Which, I take it, is a loss ofsanity.'

Searle was quiet for a long time, staring at the smooth water as itflooded so slowly towards the bridge and then was flicked under it withthe sudden hysteria of water sucked round obstacles in its path.

'Sane,' he repeated, watching the place where the water lost control andwas sucked under the culvert.

'I'm not suggesting the fellow is mad,' Walter said. 'He has just losthold of common sense.'

'And is common sense so desirable a quality?'

'An admirable quality.'

'Nothing great ever came out of common sense,' Searle said.

'On the contrary. Lack of common sense is responsible for practicallyevery ill in life. Everything from wars to not moving up in the bus. I seethere is a light in the Mill House. Marta must be back.'

They looked up at the pale bulk of the house glowing in the half-dark as apale flower glows. A single light, still bright yellow in what was left ofthe daylight, starred the side that looked on the river.

'A light the way Liz likes them,' Searle said.

'Liz?'

'She likes them golden like that in the daylight. Before the dark turnsthem white.'

For the first time Walter was forced into considering Searle in relationto Liz. It had not crossed his mind until now to consider them in relationto each other at all, since he was not in the least possessive about Liz.This unpossessiveness might have been accounted to him for virtue if ithad not sprung directly from the fact that he took her for granted. If bysome method of hypnotism the last dregs of Walter's subconscious couldhave been dragged to the surface, it would have been found that he thoughtthat Liz was doing very well for herself. Even the shadow of such athought would have shocked Walter's conscious mind, of course; but sincehe was entirely unself-analytical and largely unselfconscious (a qualitythat enabled him to perpetrate the broadcasts which so revolted Marta andendeared him to the British public), the farthest his conscious mind wentwas to hold it gratifying and proper that Liz should love him.

He had known Liz so long that she had no surprises for him. He took it forgranted that he knew everything about Liz. But he had not known a simplelittle fact like her pleasure in lights in the daytime.

And Searle, the newcomer, had learned that.

And, what was more, remembered it.

A faint ripple stirred the flat waters of Walter's self-satisfaction.

'Have you met Marta Hallard?' he asked.

'No.'

'We must remedy that.'

'I have seen her act, of course.'

'In what?'

'A play called Walk in Darkness.'

'Oh, yes. She was good in that. One of her best parts, I think,' Waltersaid, and dropped the subject. He did not want to talk about Walk inDarkness. Walk in Darkness might be a Hallard memory, but it was onethat held also Marguerite Merriam.

'I suppose we couldn't drop in now?' Searle said, looking up at the light.

'It's a little too near dinner time, I think. Marta isn't the kind ofperson you drop in on very easily. That, I suspect, is why she chose theisolated Mill House.'

'Perhaps Liz could take me down and present me tomorrow.'

Walter had nearly said: 'Why Liz?' when he remembered that tomorrow wasFriday, and that he would be away all day in town. Friday was broadcastday. Searle had remembered that he would not be here tomorrow although hehimself had forgotten. Another ripple stirred.

'Yes. Or we might ask her up to dinner. She likes good food. Well, Isuppose we had better be getting along.'

But Searle did not move. He was looking up the avenue of willows thatbordered the flat pewter surface of the darkening water.

'I've got it!' he said.

'Got what?'

'The theme. The connecting link. The motif.'

'For the book, you mean?'

'Yes. The river. The Rushmere. Why didn't we think of that before?'

'The river! Yes! Why didn't we? I suppose because it isn't entirely anOrfordshire river. But of course it is the perfect solution. It has beendone repeatedly for the Thames, and for the Severn. I don't see why itshouldn't work with the smaller Rushmere.'

'Would it give us the variety we need for the book?'

'Indubitably,' said Walter. 'It couldn't be better. It rises in that hillycountry, all sheep and stone walls and sharp outlines; then there's thepastoral bit with beautiful farm houses, and great barns, and Englishtrees at their best, and village churches like cathedrals; and thenWickham, the essence of English market towns, where the villein thatmarched from the town cross to speak to King Richard in London is the sameman that prods today's heifer on to the train on its way to theArgentine.' Walter's hand stole up to the breast pocket where he kept hisnotebook, but fell away again. 'Then the marshes. You know: skeins ofgeese against an evening sky. Great cloudscapes and shivering grasses.Then the port: Mere Harbour. Almost Dutch. A complete contrast to thecounty at its back. A town full of lovely individual building, and aharbour full of fishing and coastwise traffic. Gulls, and reflections, andgables. Searle, it's perfect!'

'When do we start?'

'Well, first, how do we do it?'

'Will this thing take a boat?'

'Only a punt. Or a skiff where it widens below the bridge.'

'A punt,' Searle said doubtfully. 'That's one of those flat duck-shootingthings.'

'Approximately.'

'That doesn't sound very handy. It had better be canoes.'

'Canoes!'

'Yes. Can you manage one?'

'I've paddled one round an ornamental pond when I was a child. That'sall.'

'Oh, well, at least you've got the hang of it. You'll soon remember thedrill. How far up could we start, with canoes? Man, it's a wonderful idea.It even gives us our title. "Canoes on the Rushmere." A title with anice swing to it. Like "Drums Along the Mohawk." Or "Oil for the Lampsof China".'

'We shall have to tramp the first bit of it. The sheep-country bit. Downto about Otley. I expect the stream will take a canoe at Otley. Though,God help me, I don't anticipate being much at home in a canoe. We cancarry a small pack from the source of the river—it's a spring in themiddle of a field, I've always understood—down to Otley or Capel, andfrom there to the sea we canoe. "Canoes on the Rushmere". Yes, it soundsall right. When I go up to town tomorrow I'll go and see Cormac Ross andput the proposition to him and see what he is moved to offer. If hedoesn't like it, I have half a dozen more who will jump at it. But Ross isin Lavinia's pocket, so we might as well make use of him if he will play.'

'Of course he will,' Searle said. 'You're practically royalty in thiscountry, aren't you!'

If there was any feeling in the gibe it was not apparent.

'I should really offer it to Debham's,' Walter said. 'They did my bookabout farm life. But I quarrelled with them about the illustrations. Theywere dreadful, and the book didn't sell.'

'That was before you took to the air, I infer.'

'Oh, yes.' Walter pushed himself off the bridge and began to walk towardsthe field-path and dinner. 'They did refuse my poems, after the farm book,so I can use that as a get-out.'

'You write poems too?'

'Who doesn't?'

'I for one.'

'Clod!' said Walter amiably.

And they went back to discussing the ways and means of their progress downthe Rushmere.

5

'Come up to town with me and see Ross,' Walter said at breakfast nextmorning.

But Searle wanted to stay in the country. It was blasphemy, he said, tospend even one day in London with the English countryside bursting intoits first green. Besides, he did not know Ross. It would be better ifWalter put the proposition to Ross first, and brought him into thebusiness later.

And Walter, though disappointed, did not stop to analyse the exact qualityof his disappointment.

But as he drove up to town his mind was much less occupied than usual withthe matter of his broadcast, and a great deal oftener than usual itstrayed back to Trimmings.

He went to see Ross and laid before him the plans for Canoes on theRushmere. Ross professed himself delighted and allowed himself to bebeaten up an extra 2-1/2 per cent on a provisional agreement. But ofcourse nothing could be settled, he pointed out, until he had consultedCromarty.

It was popularly supposed that Ross had taken Cromarty into partnershipfor the fun of it; as a matter of euphony. He had been doing quite wellfor himself as Cormac Ross, as far as anyone could judge, and there seemedon the surface no reason to rope in a partner; more especially a partneras colourless as Cromarty. But Cormac Ross had sufficient West Highlandblood in him to find it difficult to say no. He liked to be liked. So heengaged Cromarty as his smoke-screen. When an author could be receivedwith open arms, the open arms were Cormac Ross's. When an author hadregretfully to be turned down it was on account of Cromarty'sintransigeance. Cromarty had once said to Ross in a fit of temper: 'Youmight at least let me see the books I turn down!' But that was anextreme case. Normally Cromarty did read the books that he was going to beresponsible for rejecting.

Now, faced with the offer of a book by the British Public's currentdarling, Ross used the automatic phrase about consulting his partner; buthis round pink face shone with satisfaction, and he bore Walter off tolunch and bought him a bottle of Romanée-Conti; which was wasted onWalter, who liked beer.

So, full of good burgundy and the prospect of cheques to come, Walter wenton to the studio and his mind once more began to play tricks on him andrun away back to Salcott instead of staying delightedly in the studio aswas its habit.

For half of his weekly time on the air Walter always had a guest. Someoneconnected with the Open Air; a commodity in which Walter had lately takenso much stock as to make it a virtual Whitmore monopoly. Walter compèredthe Open Air in the shape of a poacher, a sheep farmer from the backblocks of Australia, a bird watcher, a keeper from Sutherland, an earnestfemale who went round pushing acorns into roadside banks, a youngdilettante who hunted with a hawk, and anyone else who happened to be bothhandy and willing. For the latter half of his time Walter merely talked.

Today his guest was a child who kept a tame fox, and Walter was dismayedto find himself disliking the brat. Walter loved his guests. He felt warmand protective and all-brothers-together about them; he never lovedmankind so largely or so well as when he and his guests were talkingtogether in his Half Hour. He loved them to the point of tears. And now itupset him to feel detached and critical about Harold Dibbs and his sillyfox. Harold had a sadly under-developed jaw, he noticed, and lookedregrettably like a fox himself. Perhaps the fox had stayed with himbecause it had felt at home. He felt guilty about having had this thoughtand tried to compensate by giving his voice more warmth than it wouldcarry, so that his interest had a forced note. Harold and his fox wereWalter's first failure.

Nor was the talk successful enough to blot out the memory of Harold. Thetalk was about 'What Earthworms do for England'. The 'for England' was atypical Whitmore touch. Other men might speak on the place of theEarthworm in Nature, and no one cared two hoots either about Nature orearthworms. But Walter pinned his worm on to a Shakespearean hook andangled gently with it, so that his listeners saw the seething legions ofblind purpose turning the grey rock in the western sea into the greenParadise that was England. There would be fifty-seven letters tomorrowmorning by the first available post from north of the Border, of course,to point out that Scotland too had her earthworms. But this was just somuch additional evidence of Walter's drawing-power.

It was Walter's secret habit to speak to one particular person whenbroadcasting; a trick which helped him to achieve that unselfconsciousfriendliness which was his trade-mark. It was never a real person; nor didhe ever visualise his imaginary hearer in detail. He merely decided thattoday he would talk to 'an old lady in Leeds', or 'a little girl inhospital in Bridgwater', or 'a lighthouse-keeper in Scotland'. Today forthe first time he thought of speaking to Liz. Liz always listened to hisbroadcast, and he took it for granted that she would listen, but hisimaginary listener was so much a part of his act that it had neveroccurred to him before to use Liz as the person he talked to. Now, today,some obscure need to bind Liz closely to him, to make sure that she wasthere, blotted out his 'pretence' listener, and he talked to Liz.

But it was not the success it should have been. The mere recollection ofLiz wooed his mind from the script, so that he remembered last night bythe river, and the darkening willows, and the single golden star in theside of the Mill House. A daffodil-pale light, 'the way Liz liked them'.And his attention wandered from the worms and from England and he stumbledover the words, so that the illusion of spontaneity was lost.

Puzzled and a little annoyed, but still not greatly disturbed, he signedthe autograph books that had been sent to the studio for that purpose,decided what was to be done in the case of (a) a request for hispresence at a christening, (b) a request for one of his ties, (c)nineteen requests to appear on his programme, and (d) seven requests forfinancial loans; and turned his face homewards. As an afterthought heturned back and bought a pound boot of chocolate dragées for Liz. As hetucked it into the glove compartment it occurred to him that it must besome time since he took Liz something on his way home. It was a pleasanthabit; he must do it more often.

It was only when the traffic dropped behind him, and the Roman directnessof the arterial highway stretched uneventful in front of him that his mindwent past Liz to the thing her image was hiding: Searle. Searle. PoorSerge's 'middle-west Lucifer'. Why Lucifer, he wondered? Lucifer, Princeof the Morning. He had always pictured Lucifer as a magnificent, burningfigure six-and-a-half feet tall. Not at all like Searle. What in Searlehad suggested Lucifer to Ratoff's accusing mind?

Lucifer. A fallen glory. A beauty turned evil.

He saw in his mind a picture of the Searle who walked round the farm withhim; his hatless blond hair blown into untidy ends by the wind, his handspushed deep into very English flannels. Lucifer. He nearly laughed aloud.

But there was, of course, a strangeness in Searle's good looks. A—whatwas it?—an unplaceable quality. Something not quite of the world of men.

Perhaps that was what had suggested fallen angels to Serge's fertile mind.

Anyhow, Searle seemed a good chap, and they were going to do a booktogether; and Searle knew that he was engaged to marry Liz, so that hewould not——

He did not finish the thought, even to himself. Nor did it occur to him towonder how a beauty that made one think of fallen angels was likely toaffect a young woman engaged to a B.B.C. commentator.

He drove home at a better speed than normally, put away the car, tookLiz's favourite sweets out of their place in the glove compartment, andwent in to present them and be kissed for his forethought. He was also thebearer of the good news that Cormac Ross liked the idea of the book andwas prepared to pay them well for it. He could hardly wait to reach thedrawing-room.

The baronial hall was very silent and cold as he crossed it, and itsmelled, in spite of anachronistic baize doors, of sprouts and stewedrhubarb. In the drawing-room, which as usual was warm and gay, there wasno one but Lavinia, who was sitting with her feet on the fender and herlap covered with that day's issue of the highbrow weeklies.

'It's a strange thing,' said Lavinia, taking her nose out of theWatchman, 'how immoral it is to make money out of writing.'

'Hullo, Aunt Vin. Where are the others?'

'This rag used to worship Silas Weekley until he went and made himself afortune. Em is upstairs, I think. The others aren't back yet.'

'Back? Back from where?'

'I don't know. They went out in that dreadful little car of Bill Maddox'safter lunch.'

'After lunch.'

'"The slick repetition of a technique as lacking in subtlety as a poster."Don't they make you sick! Yes, I didn't need Liz this afternoon, so theywent out. It has been a glorious day, hasn't it?'

'But it is only ten minutes till dinner time!'

'Yes. Looks as though they're going to be late,' said Lavinia, her eyespursuing the slaughter of Silas.

So Liz hadn't heard the broadcast! He had been talking to her and shehadn't even been listening. He was dumbfounded. The fact that the old ladyin Leeds, and the child in the hospital in Bridgwater, and thelighthouse-keeper in Scotland hadn't been listening either made nodifference. Liz always listened. It was her business to listen. He wasWalter, her fiancé, and if he spoke to the world it was right that sheshould listen. And now she had gone out gaily with Leslie Searle and lefthim talking into thin air. She had gone out gadding without a thought, ona Friday, on his broadcast afternoon, gone out God knew where, withSearle, with a fellow she had known only seven days, and they stayed outto the very last minute. She wasn't even there to have chocolates givenher when he had gone out of his way to get them for her. It was monstrous.

Then the vicar arrived. No one had remembered that he was coming todinner. He was that kind of man. And Walter had to spend another fifteenminutes with earthworms when he had already had more than enough of them.The vicar had listened to his broadcast and was enchanted by it; he couldtalk of nothing else.

Mrs Garrowby came in, greeted the vicar with commendable presence of mind,and went away to arrange for a supplement of tinned peas to the entrée anda pastry covering for the stewed rhubarb.

By the time that the missing pair were twenty minutes late and MrsGarrowby had decided not to wait for them, Walter had changed his attitudeand decided that Liz was dead. She would never be late for dinner. She waslying dead in a ditch somewhere. Perhaps with the car on top of her.Searle was an American and it was well-known that all Americans werereckless drivers and had no patience with English lanes. They had probablygone round a corner slap into something.

He played with his soup, his heart black with dread, and listened to thevicar on demonology. He had heard at one time or another everything thatthe vicar had to say on the subject of demonology, but at least it was arelief to get away from worms.

Just when his heart had blackened and shrunk to the state of a very oldmushroom, the gay voices of Searle and Liz could be heard in the hall.They came in breathless and radiant. Full of off-hand apology for theirlateness and commendation for the family in that they had not kept dinnerback for them. Liz presented Searle to the vicar but did not think ofcasting any special word to Walter before falling on her soup like astarving refugee. They had been all over the place, they said; first theyhad viewed Twells Abbey, and adjacent villages; then they had met PeterMassie and had gone to look at his horses and given him a lift into Crome;then they had had tea at the Star and Garter in Crome, and they had beenon the way home out of Crome when they found a cinema which was showingThe Great Train Robbery, and it was of course not in anyone's power torefuse a chance of viewing The Great Train Robbery. They had had to sitthrough several modern exhibits before The Great Train Robberyappeared—which was what had made them late—but it had been worth waitingfor.

An account of The Great Train Robbery occupied most of the fish course.

'How was the broadcast, Walter?' Liz said, reaching for some bread.

It was bad enough that she did not say: 'I am desolated to have missedyour broadcast, Walter'; but that she should spare for the broadcast onlythe part of her mind that was not occupied with the replenishing of herbread plate was the last straw.

'The vicar will tell you,' said Walter. 'He listened.'

The vicar told them, con amore. Neither Liz nor Leslie Searle, Walternoticed, really listened. Once, during the recital, Liz met Searle'sglance as she passed him something and gave him her quick friendly smile.They were very pleased with themselves, with each other, and with the daythey had had.

'He was delighted with the idea,' Walter said, wishing passionately thathe had never begun this partnership with Searle.

'Have you heard what they plan, Vicar?' Mrs Garrowby said. 'They are goingto write a book about the Rushmere. From its source to the sea. Walter isgoing to write it and Mr Searle to illustrate it.'

The vicar approved of the idea and pointed out its classic form. Was it tobe on shanks's mare or with a donkey, he asked.

'On foot down to Otley, or thereabouts,' Walter said. 'And by water fromthere.'

'By water? But the Rushmere is full of snags in its early reaches,' thevicar said.

They told him about the canoes. The vicar thought canoes a sensible craftfor a river like the Rushmere, but wondered where they could be got.

'I talked to Cormac Ross about that today,' Walter said, 'and he suggestedthat Kilner's, the small craft builders at Mere Harbour, might have some.They build for all over the world. It was Joe Kilner who designed thatcollapsible raft-boat-tent that Mansell took up the Orinoco on his lasttrip, and then said afterwards that if he had thought in time he couldhave made it a glider too. I was going to suggest that Searle and I shouldgo over to Mere Harbour tomorrow and see Kilner—if he has no otherplans.'

'Fine,' Searle said. 'Fine.'

Then the vicar asked Searle if he fished. Searle did not, but the vicardid. The vicar's other interest, a short head behind demonology, was thedry fly. So for the rest of dinner they listened to the vicar on flies,with the detached interest that they might bring to cement-mixing, orgum-chewing, or turning the heel of a sock; a subject of academic interestonly. And each of them used the unoccupied half of their minds in theirown fashion.

Walter decided that he would leave the little white packet of chocolateson the hall table, where he had dropped it as he went in to dinner, untilLiz asked about it; when he would tell her casually what it was. She wouldbe full of compunction, he decided, that he had thought of her while shehad entirely forgotten him.

As they walked out of the dining-room he glanced sideways to make surethat the little packet was still there. It certainly was. But Liz, too, itseemed, had dropped something on the table on her way in to dinner. Agreat flat box of candy from the most expensive confectioners in Crome.Four pounds weight at the very least. 'Confits,' it said in dull goldfreehand across its cream surface, and it was tied up with yards of broadribbon finished in a most extravagant bow. Walter considered the 'confits'affected and the ribbon deplorably ostentatious. The whole thing was inthe worst of taste. So like an American to buy something large and showy.It made him quite sick to look at it.

What made him sick, of course, was not the box of candy.

He was sick of an emotion that was old before candy was invented.

As he poured brandy for Searle, the vicar and himself to drink with theircoffee he looked round in his mind for comfort, and found it.

Searle might give her boxes of expensive sweetmeats, but it was he,Walter, who knew what her favourite sweets were.

Or—did Searle know that too? Perhaps the Crome confectioner didn't happento have dragées.

He tilted the brandy bottle again. He needed an extra spot tonight.

6

If Emma Garrowby could ever be said to be glad of any connection ofLeslie Searle with Trimmings, she was glad of the plan for the book. Itwould take him away from the household for the rest of his stay inOrfordshire; and once the Rushmere trip was over he would go away and theywould see no more of him. No harm had been done so far, that she couldsee. Liz liked being with the creature, of course, because they were bothyoung and because they seemed to laugh at the same things and because,naturally, he was attractive to look at. But she showed no signs of beingseriously attracted. She never looked at Searle unless she had somethingto say to him; never followed him with her eyes as girls in love did,never sat near him in a room.

For all her apprehensiveness, Emma Garrowby was an imperceptive woman.

It was the semi-detached Lavinia, oddly enough, who observed and wastroubled. The trouble welled up and overflowed into words, almost againsther will, some seven days later. She was dictating as usual to Liz, butwas making heavy weather of it. This was so rare that Liz was puzzled.Lavinia wrote her books with great ease, being genuinely interested in thefate of her current heroine. She might not remember afterwards whether itwas Daphne or Valerie who had met her lover when she was gathering violetsin the dawn on Capri, but while Daphne (or Valerie) had been in theprocess of that meeting and that gathering Lavinia Fitch watched over herlike a godmother. Now, contrary to all precedent, she was distrait and hadgreat difficulty in remembering even what Sylvia looked like.

'Where was I, Liz, where was I?' she said, striding up and down the room;a pencil stuck through the bird's-nest mop of sandy hair and another beingchewed to pulp between her sharp little teeth.

'Sylvia is coming in from the garden. Through the French window.'

'Oh, yes. "Sylvia paused in the window, her slim form outlined against thelight, her large blue eyes wary and doubtful——"'

'Brown,' said Liz.

'What?'

'Her eyes.' Liz flipped back some pages of the script. 'Page 59. "Herbrown eyes, limpid as rainpools lying on autumn leaves——"'

'All right, all right. "—her large brown eyes wary and doubtful. With agraceful movement of resolution she stepped into the room, her tiny heelstapping lightly on the parquet floor——"'

'No heels.'

'What d'you say?'

'No heels.'

'Why not?'

'She has just been playing tennis.'

'She could have changed, couldn't she?' Lavinia said with a touch ofasperity that was foreign to her.

'I don't think so,' Liz said patiently. 'She is still carrying her racket.She came along the terrace "swinging her racket lightly".'

'Oh. Did she!' Lavinia said explosively. 'I bet she can't even play!Where was I? "She stepped into the room—she stepped into the room, herwhite frock fluttering"—no; no, wait—"she stepped into the room"—Oh,damn Sylvia!' she burst out, flinging her chewed pencil on to the desk.'Who cares what the silly moron does! Let her stay in the blasted windowand starve!'

'What is the matter, Aunt Vin?'

'I can't concentrate.'

'Are you worried about something?'

'No. Yes. No. At least, yes, I suppose I am, in a way.'

'Can I help?'

Lavinia ran her fingers through the bird's-nest, found the pencil there,and looked gratified. 'Why, there's my yellow pencil.' She put it backagain in her hair-do. 'Liz, dear, don't think me interfering or anything,will you, but you're not by any chance getting a little—a littlesmitten with Leslie Searle, are you?'

Liz thought how like her aunt it was to use an out-of-date Edwardianismlike 'smitten'. She was always having to modernise Lavinia's slang forher.

'If by "smitten" you mean in love with him, be comforted. I'm not.'

'I don't know that that's what I do mean. You don't love a magnet, if itcomes to that.'

'A what! What are you talking about?'

'It isn't a falling in love, so much. It's an attraction. He fascinatesyou, doesn't he.' She made it a statement, not a question.

Liz looked up at the troubled childish eyes, and hedged. 'Why should youthink that?' she asked.

'I suppose because I feel it too,' Lavinia said.

This was so unexpected that Liz had no words.

'I wish now I had never asked him down to Trimmings,' Lavinia saidmiserably. 'I know it isn't his fault—it isn't anything he does—butthere's no denying that he is an upsetting person. There's Serge and TobyTullis not on speaking terms——'

'That is nothing new!'

'No, but they had become friends again, and Serge was behaving quitewell and working, and now—'

'You can hardly blame Leslie Searle for that. It would have happenedinevitably. You know it would.'

'And it was very odd the way Marta took him back with her after dinnerthe other night and kept him till all hours. I mean the way sheappropriated him as her escort, without waiting to see what the otherswere doing.'

'But the vicar was there to see Miss Easton-Dixon home. Marta knew that.It was natural that he should go with Miss Dixon; they live in the samedirection.'

'It wasn't what she did, it was the way she did it. She—she grabbed.'

'Oh, that is just Marta's lordly way.'

'Nonsense. She felt it too. The—the fascination.'

'Of course, he is exceedingly attractive,' Liz said; and thought howutterly the cliché failed to convey any quality of Leslie Searle's.

'He is—uncanny,' Lavinia said, unhappily. 'There is no other word. Youwait and watch for the next thing he is going to do, as if it were—as ifit were a sign, or a portent, or a revelation, or something.' She used the'you' impersonally, but caught Liz's eye and said challengingly: 'Well,you do don't you!'

'Yes,' Liz said. 'Yes, I suppose it is like that. As if—as if thesmallest thing he does had significance.'

Lavinia picked up the chewed pencil from the desk and doodled with it onthe blotter. Liz noticed that she was making figures-of-eight. Laviniamust be very troubled indeed. When she was happy she made herring-bones.

'It's very odd, you know,' Lavinia said, mulling it over in her mind. 'Iget the same "kick" out of being in a room with him that I would get outof being in a room with a famous criminal. Only nicer, of course. But thesame feeling of—of wrongness.' She made several furious figures-of-eight.'If he were to disappear tonight, and someone told me that he was just abeautiful demon and not a human being at all, I would believe them. Sohelp me, I would.'

Presently she flung the pencil back on to the desk, and said with a littlelaugh: 'And yet it's all so absurd. You look at him and try to find outwhat is so extraordinary about him, and what is there? Nothing. Nothingthat can't be matched elsewhere, is there? That radiant fairness and thatskin like a baby; that Norwegian correspondent of the Clarion thatWalter used to bring down had those. He is extraordinarily graceful for aman; but so is Serge Ratoff. He has a nice gentle voice and an engagingdrawl; but so have half the inhabitants of Texas and a large part of thepopulation of Ireland. You catalogue his attractions and what do they addup to? I can tell you what they don't add up to. They don't add up toLeslie Searle.'

'No,' said Liz soberly. 'No. They don't.'

'The—the exciting thing is left out. What is it that makes himdifferent? Even Emma feels it, you know.'

'Mother?'

'Only it takes her the opposite way. She hates it. She quite oftendisapproves of the people I bring down, sometimes she even dislikes them.But she loathes Leslie Searle.'

'Has she told you so?'

'No. She didn't have to.'

No, thought Liz. She did not have to. Lavinia Fitch—dear, kind,abstracted Lavinia—manufacturer of fiction for the permanentlyadolescent, had after all a writer's intuition.

'I wondered for a while if it was that he was a little mad,' Lavinia said.

'Mad!'

'Only nor-nor-west, of course. There is an unholy attraction about peoplewho are stark crazy in one direction but quite sane every other way.'

'Only if you know about their craziness,' Liz pointed out. 'You would haveto know about their mental kink before you suffered any unholyattraction.'

Lavinia considered that. 'Yes, I suppose you are right. But it doesn'tmatter, because I decided for myself that the "mad" theory didn't work. Ihave never met anyone saner than Leslie Searle. Have you?'

Liz hadn't.

'You don't think, do you,' Lavinia said, taking to doodling again andavoiding her niece's eye, 'that Walter is beginning to resent Leslie?'

'Walter,' Liz said, startled. 'No, of course not. They are the greatestfriends.'

Lavinia, having with seven neat strokes erected a house, put the door init.

'Why should you think that about Walter?' Liz said, challenging.

Lavinia added four windows and a chimney-stack, and considered the effect.

'Because he is so considerate to him.'

'Considerate! But Walter is always——'

'When Walter likes people he takes them for granted,' Lavinia said, makingsmoke. 'The more he likes them the more he takes them for granted. He eventakes you for granted—as you have no doubt observed before now. Untillately he took Leslie Searle for granted. He doesn't any more.'

Liz considered this in silence.

'If he didn't like him,' she said at length, 'he wouldn't be doing theRushmere with him, or the book. Well, would he?' she added, as Laviniaseemed wholly absorbed in the correct placing of a doorknob.

'The book is going to be very profitable,' Lavinia said, with only a hintof dryness.

'Walter would never collaborate with someone he didn't like,' Liz saidstoutly.

'And Walter might find it difficult to explain why he didn't want to dothe book after all,' Lavinia said as if she had not spoken.

'Why are you telling me this?' Liz said, half angry.

Lavinia stopped doodling and said disarmingly: 'Liz darling, I don't quiteknow, except perhaps that I was hoping you would find some way ofreassuring Walter. In your own clever way. Which is to say, withoutdotting any I's or crossing any T's.' She caught Liz's glance, and said:'Oh, yes, you are clever. A great deal cleverer than Walter will ever be.He is not very clever, poor Walter. The best thing that ever happened tohim was that you should love him.' She pushed the defaced blotter awayfrom her and smiled suddenly, 'I don't think, you know, that it isentirely a Bad Thing that he should have a rival to contend with. As longas there is no chance of the contention becoming serious.'

'Of course it isn't serious,' Liz said.

'Then suppose we get that moron out of the window, and finish the chapterbefore lunch,' Lavinia said, and, picking up the pencil, began to chew onit again.

But a sense of shock stayed with Liz while she recorded, for the ultimatebenefit of the lending libraries and the Inland Revenue, the doings ofSylvia the moron. It had not occurred to her that her awareness of Searlecould be known to anyone but herself. Now it seemed that not only didLavinia know very accurately how she felt about him, but she hinted thatWalter too might know. But that surely was impossible. How could he know?Lavinia knew because, as she so frankly said, she too was a victim of theSearle charm. But Walter would have no such pointer to her emotions.

And yet Lavinia had been so right. Walter's first easy taking-for-grantedattitude to the visitor had changed to a host and guest relationship. Ithad changed imperceptibly and yet almost overnight. When and why had itchanged? There was the unfortunate coinciding of the two so-differentboxes of sweets; but that could hardly have rankled in any adult mind. Thebuying of candy for a girl was an automatic reflex with Americans; of nomore significance than letting her go first through a doorway. Waltercould hardly have resented that. How then could Walter have guessed thesecret that was shared only by her fellow sufferer, Lavinia?

Her mind went on to consider Lavinia and her perceptions. She consideredthe one count that Lavinia had left out of the indictment—the snubbing ofToby Tullis—and wondered whether Lavinia had not mentioned it because shedid not know, or whether she was merely indifferent to any suffering thatToby might be subjected to. Toby, as the whole village knew, was enduringthe finest tortures of frustration since Tantalus. Searle had refused,with the most unimaginably kind indifference, to go to see Hoo House, orto take part in any of the other activities that Toby was eager to arrangefor him. He had even failed to show any interest when Toby offered to takehim over to Stanworth and present him. This had never happened to Tobybefore. His freedom to trot in and out of the ducal splendours ofStanworth was his trump card. He had never before played it in vain. WithAmericans especially it took the trick. But not with this American. Searlewanted no part of Toby Tullis, and made it clear with the most charminggood manners. He stonewalled with a grace that for all its mordant qualitywas delightful to watch. Intellectual Salcott watched it with opendelight.

And it was that that excoriated Toby.

To be snubbed by Leslie Searle was bad enough; to have it known that hewas snubbed was torture.

Truly, thought Liz, the advent of Leslie Searle had not been aparticularly fortunate happening for Salcott St Mary. Of all the peoplewhose lives he touched, only Miss Easton-Dixon, perhaps, was wholly gladof his coming. He had been lovely with Miss Dixon; as kind and patientwith her endless questions as though he had been a woman himself andinterested in the small talk of the film world. He had trotted out for herbenefit all the light gossip of studio politics, and had exchanged withher reminiscences of films good and films bad until Lavinia had said thatthey were like a couple of housewives swapping recipes.

That was the night that Marta had come to dinner; and there had been amoment during that evening, when Liz, watching him with Miss Dixon, wasseized with a terrible fear that she might after all be falling in lovewith Leslie Searle. She was still grateful to Marta for reassuring her.For it was when Marta commandeered him and carried him off with her intothe night, and she felt no slightest pang at seeing them go, that she knewthat, however strongly she felt Searle's attraction, she was in no bondageto him.

Now, recording the doings of Sylvia the moron, she decided that she wouldtake Lavinia's advice and find some way of reassuring Walter, so that hewent away on this trip happy and with no grudge against Searle in hisheart. When they came back from Mere Harbour, where they were takingpossession of the two canoes and arranging for their transport to Otley toawait them there, she would think up some small exclusive thing to do withWalter; something that would be tête-à-tête. It had been too often atriangle lately.

Or too often, perhaps, the wrong tête-à-tête.

7

Walter had welcomed the idea of progression by canoe, not because helooked forward to folding himself into an inadequate small boat, but,because it would give him his 'story'. If the book was to be a success hemust have 'adventures', and an unusual method of locomotion was theeasiest way of providing them. It is difficult to garner quaint experiencewhen being borne along comfortably in a car. And walking has lost facesince it became universal in the form of an activity called hiking.Walter, who had walked over a great part of Europe with a toothbrush and aspare shirt in his burberry pocket, would have been glad to do theRushmere valley on foot, but felt that he could not hope to satisfy anymodern devotee. His toothbrush-and-spare-shirt technique would merelypuzzle the masochistic enthusiasts who plodded, packed and hobnailed, tothe horizon their glazed eye was fixed on, more Atlas than Odysseus. Andto do the valley as an incidental accompaniment to puppets or a Punch andJudy might be productive of copy but was a little infra dig in one whoseholding in the Open Air was of almost proprietorial dimensions.

So Walter welcomed the idea of a canoe. And in the last week or so he hadbegun to welcome the idea for a different reason altogether.

In a car or on foot he would be cheek by jowl with Leslie Searle day afterday; in a canoe he would be virtually free of him. Walter had reached thestage when the very sound of Searle's quiet drawl annoyed him into theneed for momentary self-control. And a dim awareness that he was being alittle ridiculous did nothing to soothe his annoyance. The last straw hadbeen when Liz started being kind to him. He had never analysed Liz'sattitude to him, which had always seemed an appropriate one. That is tosay that Liz supplied the undemanding devotion that he considered ideal ina woman after eight months of Marguerite Merriam. And now Liz had gonekind on him. 'Condescending' was his private word for it. But for his newawareness of Liz he might not have noticed the change, but Liz had movedto the very forefront of his thoughts and he analysed her lightest word,her most fleeting expression. And so he caught her being kind to him.Kind! To him. To Walter Whitmore.

Nothing so revolutionary or so unbecoming could have happened but for thepresence of Leslie Searle. Walter needed a great deal of self-control whenhe thought of Leslie Searle.

They had planned to camp out each night, weather permitting; and of thistoo Walter was glad. Not only would it give him opportunities for tanglingthe Great Bear in the branches of some oak, or describing the night lifeof field and stream, but it would excuse him from the close quarters ofnight in some tiny inn. You can stroll away by yourself from a bivouac,but not, without remark, from a pub.

The canoes were dubbed Pip and Emma—the Rushmere, according to Searle,being a place where it was always afternoon—and Mrs Garrowby wasunreasonably annoyed to find that Searle owned the Emma one. But whatdismayed her far more was a dawning realisation that she might not, afterall, be getting rid of Searle. There was to be one piece of comparativecheating about the trip, it seemed. To photograph the larger pieces oflandscape needed more apparatus than could conveniently be carried in acanoe that was already occupied by a sleeping-bag and groundsheet, soSearle was to come back later and photograph the set-pieces at hisleisure.

But for all the subterranean tremors that agitated Trimmings—Lavinia'smisgiving, Walter's resentment, Liz's feeling of guilt, Emma'shatred—life on the surface was smooth. The sun shone with the incongruousbrilliance so common in England before the last trees are in leaf; thenights were windless and warm as summer. Indeed Searle, standing on thestone terrace after dinner one night, had pointed out that This Englandmight very well be That France.

'Reminds you of Villefranche on a summer night,' he said. 'Until now thathas been my measuring rod for magic. The lights on the water, and the warmair smelling of geranium, and the last boat out to the ship between oneand two in the morning.'

'What ship?' someone had asked.

'Any ship,' Searle said lazily. 'I had no idea that Perfidious Albion hadthe magic too.'

'Magic!' Lavinia had said. 'Why, we're the original firm.'

And they laughed a little and were all friendly together.

And nothing disturbed that friendliness up to the moment when Walter andSearle departed together into the English landscape late on a Fridaynight. Walter had given his usual talk, had come home for dinner (alwaysput back an hour and a half on 'talks' day) and they had all drunk to thesuccess of Canoes on the Rushmere. Then Liz drove them through the sweetspring evening, up the valley of the Rushmere, to their starting-pointtwenty miles away. They were going to spend the night in Grim's House; acave that overlooked the high pastures where the river originated. Waltersaid that it was apt and fitting that they should begin their tale inprehistoric England, but Searle doubted if the domestic arrangements werelikely to be any more prehistoric than some he had already sampled. A lotof England, he said, didn't seem to have come far from Grim, whoever hewas.

However, he was all for sleeping in a cave. He had slept, in his time, onthe floor of a truck, on the open desert, in a bath, on a billiard table,in a hammock, and inside the cabin of a Giant Wheel at a fair, but so farhe had not sampled a cave. He was all for the cave.

Liz took them to where the track ended, and walked up the hundred yards ofgrassy path with them to inspect their shelter for the night. They wereall very gay, full of good food and good drink and a little drunk with themagic of the night. They dumped their food and sleeping bags, and walkedLiz back to the car. When they stopped talking for a moment the quietpressed against their ears, so that they stayed their steps to listen forsome sound.

'I wish I wasn't going home to a roof,' Liz said into the silence. 'It's anight for the prehistoric.'

But she went away down the rutted track to the road, her headlights makingmetallic green stains on the dark grass, and left them to the silence andthe prehistoric.

After that the two explorers became mere voices on the telephone.

Each evening they rang up Trimmings from some pub or call-box to reportprogress. They had walked successfully down to Otley and found theircanoes waiting for them. They took to the river and were delighted withtheir craft. Walter's first notebook was already full, and Searle waslyrical on the beauty of this England in its first light powdering ofblossom. From Capel he called specially for Lavinia to tell her that shehad been right about the magic; England did really have the originalblue-print.

'They sound very happy,' Lavinia said in a half-doubtful, half-relievedway as she hung up. She longed to go and see them, but the compact wasthat they were to be as strangers in a strange land, passing down theriver and through Salcott St Mary as though they had never seen it before.

'You spoil my perspective if you bring Trimmings into it,' Walter hadsaid. 'I must see it as if I had never seen it before; the countryside, Imean; see it fresh and new.'

So Trimmings waited each night for their telephoned report; mildly amusedat this make-believe gulf.

And then on Wednesday evening, five days after they had set out, theywalked into the Swan and were hailed as the Stanleys of the Rushmere andtreated to drinks by all and sundry. They were tied up at Pett's Hatch,they said, and were sleeping there; but they had not been able to resistwalking across the fields to Salcott. By water it was two miles down riverfrom Pett's Hatch to Salcott, but thanks to the loop of the Rushmere itwas only a mile over the fields from one to the other. There was no inn atPett's Hatch, so they had walked by the field-path to Salcott and thefamiliar haven of the Swan.

Talk was general at first as each newcomer inquired as to how they did.But presently Walter took his beer to his favourite table in the corner,and after a little Searle followed him. Several times from then on one orother of the loungers at the bar made a movement towards the two to engagethem once more in conversation, only to pause and change his mind assomething in the attitude of the two men to each other struck him as odd.They were not quarrelling; it was just that something personal and urgentin their intercourse kept the others, almost unconsciously, from joiningthem.

And then, quite suddenly, Walter was gone.

He went without noise and without a goodnight. Only the bang of the doorcalled their attention to his exit. It was an eloquent slam, furious andfinal; a very pointed exit.

They looked in a puzzled fashion from the door to the unfinished beer atWalter's empty place, and decided in spite of that angry sound that Walterwas coming back. Searle was sitting at his ease, relaxed against the wall,smiling faintly; and Bill Maddox, encouraged by the easing of that secrettension that had hung like a cloud in the corner, moved over and joinedhim. They talked outboard-motors and debated clinker versus carvel untiltheir mugs were empty. As Maddox got up to refill them he caught sight ofthe flat liquid in Walter's mug and said: 'I'd better get another for MrWhitmore; that stuff's stale.'

'Oh, Walter has gone to bed,' Searle said.

'But it's only——' Maddox was beginning, and realised that he was aboutto be tactless.

'Yes, I know; but he thought it would be safer.'

'Is he sickening for something?'

'No, but if he stayed any longer he was liable to throttle me,' Searlesaid amiably. 'And at the school Walter went to they take a poor view ofthrottling. He is putting temptation behind him. Literally.'

'You been annoying poor Mr Whitmore?' said Bill, who felt that he knewthis young American much better than he knew Walter Whitmore.

'Horribly,' Searle said lightly, matching a smile with Bill's.

Maddox clicked his tongue and went away to get the beer.

After that, conversation became general. Searle stayed until closing time,said goodnight to Reeve, the landlord, as he locked the door behind them,and walked down the village street with the others. At the narrow lanethat led between the houses to the fields he turned off, pelted by theirmock-condolences on his lack of a snug bed, and throwing back in his turnaccusations of frowst and ageing arteries.

'Goodnight!' he called, from far down the lane.

And that was the last that anyone in Salcott St Mary ever saw of LeslieSearle.

Forty-eight hours later Alan Grant stepped back into the affairs of theTrimmings household.

8

Grant had just come back from Hampshire, where a case had endedunhappily in suicide, and his mind was still reviewing the thing,wondering how he might have managed things differently to a different end;so that he listened with only an ear-and-a-half to what his superior wassaying to him until a familiar name caught his whole attention.

'Salcott St Mary!' said Grant.

'Why?' said Bryce, stopping his account. 'Do you know the place?'

'I've never been there, but I know of it, of course.'

'Why of course?'

'It's a sort of artistic thieves'-kitchen. There's been a migration ofintelligentsia to the place. Silas Weekley lives there, and Marta Hallard,and Lavinia Fitch. Tullis has a house there too. It isn't Toby Tullis whois missing, by any chance?' he asked hopefully.

'No, unfortunately. It's a chap called Searle. Leslie Searle. A youngAmerican, it seems.'

For a moment Grant was back in the crowded doorway of Cormac Ross's room,listening to a voice saying: 'I've forgotten my megaphone.' So thebeautiful young man had disappeared.

'Orfordshire say they want to put it in our laps not because they thinkthe problem is insoluble but because it's a kid-glove affair. They thinkit would be easier for us than for them to pursue inquiries among thelocal bigwigs, and if there is any arresting to be done they would ratherthat we did it.'

'Arresting? Are they suggesting that it was murder?'

'They have a strong leaning to that theory, I understand. But, as thelocal inspector said to me, it sounds so absurd when you say it aloud thatthey shrink from uttering the name, even.'

'What name?'

'Walter Whitmore.'

'Walter Whitmore!' Grant let out his breath in a soundless whistle. 'Idon't wonder they don't like saying it aloud. Walter Whitmore! What is hesupposed to have done to Searle?'

'They don't know. All they've got is some suggestion of a quarrel beforethe disappearance. It seems that Walter Whitmore and Searle weretravelling down the Rushmere in canoes, and——'

'Canoes?'

'Yes, a kind of stunt. Whitmore was going to write about it and this chapSearle was going to supply the illustrations.'

'Is he an artist, then?'

'No. A photographer. They camped out each night, and on Wednesday nightthey were sleeping on the river bank about a mile from Salcott. They bothcame to the pub at Salcott for a drink that evening. Whitmore leftearly—in some sort of pet, it is alleged. Searle stayed till closing-timeand was seen to start off down the track to the river. After that he wasnot seen by anyone.'

'Who reported the disappearance?'

'Whitmore did next morning. When he woke and found that Searle had notoccupied his sleeping-bag.'

'He didn't see Searle at all on Wednesday night after leaving the pub?'

'No, he says he fell asleep, and though he woke in the night he took itfor granted that Searle had come back and was sleeping; it was too dark tosee anything. It was only when daylight came that he realised that Searlehad not been to bed.'

'The theory is that he fell into the river, I suppose.'

'Yes. The Wickham people took charge and dragged for a body. But it's abad, muddy stream, there, between Capel and Salcott St Mary, the Wickhampeople say, so they weren't unbearably surprised not to find one.'

'I don't wonder they don't want to touch the business,' Grant said dryly.

'No. It's a delicate affair. No real suggestion of anything but accident.And yet—one big question mark.'

'But—but Walter Whitmore!' Grant said. 'There is something inherentlyabsurd about it, you know. What would that lover of little bunnies have todo with murder?'

'You've been in the Force long enough to know that it is just those loversof little bunnies that commit murder,' his chief said snappily. 'Anyhow,it is going to be your business to sift this artistic thieves'-kitchen ofyours through a fine-mesh riddle until you're left with something thatwon't go through the mesh. You had better take a car. Wickham say it isfour miles from a station, with a change at Crome anyhow.'

'Very good. Do you mind if I take Sergeant Williams with me?'

'As chauffeur, or what?'

'No,' Grant said amiably. 'Just so that he knows the lay-out. Then if youpull me off this for something more urgent—as you will at anymoment—Williams can carry on.'

'You do think up the most convincing excuses for snoozing in a car.'

Grant took this, rightly, as capitulation, and went away to collectWilliams. He liked Williams and liked working with him. Williams was hisopposite and his complement. He was large and pink and slow-moving, and herarely read anything but an evening paper; but he had terrier qualitiesthat were invaluable in a hunt. No terrier at a rat hole ever displayedmore patience or more pertinacity than Williams did when introduced to aquarry. 'I would hate to have you on my tail,' Grant had said to him morethan once in their years of working together.

To Williams, on the other hand, Grant was everything that was brilliantand spontaneous. He admired Grant with passion, and envied him withoutmalice; Williams had no ambition, and coveted no man's shoes. 'You've noidea how lucky you are, sir,' Williams would say, 'not looking like apoliceman. Me, I go into a pub, and they take one look at me and think:Copper! But with you, they just cast an eye over you and think: Army inplain clothes; and they don't think another thing about you. It's a greatadvantage in a job like ours, sir.'

'But you have advantages that I lack, Williams,' Grant had once pointedout.

'As what, for instance?' Williams had said, unbelieving.

'You have only to say: "Hop it!" and people just dissolve. When I say"Hop it!" to anyone, they are as likely as not to say: "Who do you thinkyou're talking to?"'

'Lord love you, sir,' Williams had said. 'You don't even have to say: "Hopit!" You just look at them, and they begin to recollect appointments.'

Grant had laughed and said: 'I must try that sometime!' But he enjoyedWilliams's mild hero-worship; and still more he enjoyed his reliabilityand his persistence.

'Do you listen to Walter Whitmore, Williams?' he asked, as Williams drovehim down the unswerving road that the Legions had first surveyed twothousand years ago.

'Can't say I do, sir. I'm not one for the country, much. Being born andbrought up in it is a drawback.'

'A drawback?'

'Yes. You know just how workaday it really is.'

'More Silas Weekley than Walter Whitmore.'

'I don't know about the Silas bloke, but it certainly isn't like anythingWalter Whitmore makes of it.' He thought of it for a little. 'He's adresser-upper,' he said. 'Look at this Rushmere trip.'

'I'm looking.'

'I mean, there wasn't anything to prevent him staying at home with hisaunt and doing the river valley like a Christian, in a car. The Rushmereisn't all that long. But no, he has to frill it up with a canoe andthings.'

Mention of Walter's aunt prompted Grant to another question.

'I suppose you don't read Lavinia Fitch?'

'No, but Nora does.'

Nora was Mrs Williams, and the mother of Angela and Leonard.

'Does she like them?'

'Loves them. She says three things make her feel cosy in advance. Ahot-water bottle, a quarter-pound of chocolates, and a new Lavinia Fitch.'

'If Miss Fitch did not exist, it seems, it would be necessary to inventher,' Grant said.

'Must make a fortune,' said Williams. 'Is Whitmore her heir?'

'Her presumptive heir, at any rate. But it isn't Lavinia who hasdisappeared.'

'No. What could Whitmore have against this Searle chap?'

'Perhaps he just objects to fauns on principle.'

'To what, sir?'

'I saw Searle once.'

'You did!'

'I spoke to him in passing at a party about a month ago.'

'What was he like, sir?'

'A very good-looking young man indeed.'

'Oh,' Williams said, in a thoughtful way.

'No,' said Grant.

'No?'

'American,' Grant said irrelevantly. And then, remembering that party,added: 'He seemed to be interested in Liz Garrowby, now that I remember.'

'Who is Liz Garrowby?'

'Walter Whitmore's fiancée.'

'He was? Well!'

'But don't go making five of it until we get some evidence. I can'tbelieve that Walter Whitmore ever had enough red blood in him to conkanyone on the head and push them into a river.'

'No,' Williams said, considering it. 'Come to think of it, he's more of apush-ee.'

Which put Grant in a good mood for the rest of the journey.

At Wickham they were welcomed by the local inspector, Rodgers; a thin,anxious individual who looked as though he slept badly. He was alert,however, and informative and full of forethought. He had even booked tworooms at the Swan in Salcott and two at the White Hart in Wickham, so thatGrant could have his choice. He bore them off to lunch at the White Hart,where Grant confirmed the room-booking and caused the Salcott booking tobe cancelled. There was to be no suggestion yet that Scotland Yard wereinterested in the matter of Leslie Searle's disappearance; and it was notpossible to conduct inquiries from the Swan without creating a sensationin Salcott.

'I'd like to see Whitmore, though,' Grant said. 'I suppose he is backat—what do you call it: Miss Fitch's place.'

'Trimmings. But he's up in town today giving his broadcast.'

'In London?' said Grant, a little surprised.

'It was arranged like that before they set out on this trip. Mr Whitmore'scontract calls for a month off in August, when broadcasting has its "off"season; so there was no question, it seems, of passing up this week'sbroadcast just because he was canoeing on the Rushmere. They had arrangedto be in Wickham today and to spend the night there. They had booked tworooms at the Angel. It's the olde-worlde show-place in Wickham. Veryphotogenic. Then this happened. But since there was nothing Mr Whitmorecould do here, he went up to do his half-hour, just as he would have ifthey had reached Wickham.'

'I see. And he is coming back tonight?'

'If he doesn't vanish into thin air.'

'About this vanishing: did Whitmore agree that there had been disagreementbetween them?'

'I didn't put it to him. That's what——' The Inspector broke off.

'That's what I'm here for,' Grant said, finishing the sentence for him.

'That's about it, sir.'

'Where did the "disagreement" story come from?'

'The Swan. Everyone who was there on Wednesday night had the impressionthat there was some kind of tension between them.'

'No overt quarrel?'

'No, nothing like that. If there had been anything like that I could havetaxed him with it. All that happened was that Mr Whitmore left earlywithout saying goodnight, and Searle said he was angry about something.'

'Searle said! To whom?'

'To the local garage-keeper. A chap called Maddox. Bill Maddox.'

'Have you talked to Maddox?'

'I talked to them all. I was in the Swan last night. We spent the daydragging the river in case he had fallen in, and making inquiries allround the neighbourhood in case he had lost his memory and was justwandering. We couldn't find any body, and no one had seen him or anyoneanswering his description. So I finished up at the Swan, and saw most ofthe people who had been there on Wednesday night. It's the only pub in theplace, and a very nice respectable little house run by a Joey; anex-sergeant of Marines; and it's the meeting-place for the whole village.None of them was exactly anxious to involve Mr Whitmore——'

'Popular, is he?'

'Well, popular enough. He probably shines by comparison. There's a veryodd crew lives here, I don't know if you know.'

'Yes, I've heard.'

'So they didn't want to get Walter Whitmore into trouble, but they had toexplain why the two friends didn't go back to their camp together. Andonce they broke down and talked they were unanimous that there was somesort of trouble between them.'

'Did this Maddox volunteer his story?'

'No, the local butcher did. Maddox had told them about it on the way homeon Wednesday. After they had seen Searle go away by himself down the lane.Maddox confirmed it, though.'

'Well, I'll go and see Whitmore when he comes back tonight, and ask forhis story. Meanwhile we'll go and see the place where they camped onWednesday night.'

9

'I don't want to appear in Salcott just yet,' Grant said as they droveout of Wickham. 'Is there some other way to the river bank?'

'There's no way at all to the river bank, properly speaking. There's abouta mile of field-path from Salcott to where they were. But we could reachthe place just as easily from the main Wickham-Crome road, across thefields. Or we could turn off the road by a lane that goes to Pett's Hatch,and walk down the river bank from there. They were moored about a quartermile below Pett's Hatch.'

'On the whole, I'd rather walk across the fields from the main road. Itwould be interesting to see how much of a walk it is. What kind of avillage is Pett's Hatch?'

'It isn't a village at all. Just a ruined mill and the few cottages thatused to house the workers there. That is why Whitmore and Searle walkedinto Salcott for their evening drink.'

'I see.'

The ever-efficient Rodgers pulled a one-inch Survey map out of the pocketof his car, and studied it. The field opposite which they had stoppedlooked to Grant's urban eye exactly like any other field that they hadpassed since leaving Wickham, but the Inspector said: 'It should be aboutopposite here, I think. Yes; there's where they were; and here is us.'

He showed the lay-out to Grant. North and south ran the road from Wickhamsouth to Crome. West of it lay the Rushmere, out of sight in its valley,running north-east to meet the road at Wickham. At a point level withwhere they were now halted, the river ran back on itself in a wide loopover the flat bed of the valley. At the point where it first curved back,Whitmore and Searle had made their camp. On the farther side of thevalley, where the river came back level with them, was Salcott St Mary.Both their camp and the village of Salcott were on the right bank of theriver, so that only a short mile of alluvial land lay between their campand the village.

As the three men reached the third field from the road, the countrysideopened below them, so that the relevant section of the Rushmere valley waslaid out for them as it had been on Rodgers's map: the flat green floorwith the darker green scarf of the Rushmere looped across it, the huddleof roofs and gardens on the far side where Salcott St Mary stood in itstrees; the lonely cluster, back up the river to the south, that was Pett'sHatch.

'Where is the railway from here?' Grant asked.

'There is no railway nearer than Wickham. No station, that is. The lineruns the other side of the Wickham-Crome road; not in the valley at all.'

'Plenty of buses on the Wickham-Crome road?'

'Oh, yes. But you're not suggesting that the fellow just ducked, are you?'

'I'm keeping the possibility in mind. After all, we know nothing abouthim. I'll admit there are more likely possibilities.'

Rodgers led them down the long slope to the river bank. Where the riverturned away south-west two large trees broke the line of pollardedwillows: a tall willow and an ash. Under the ash were moored two canoes.The grass still had a trampled look.

'This is the place,' Rodgers said. 'Mr Whitmore spread his sleeping-bagunder that big willow, and Searle put his round the other side of the ashwhere there is a hollow between the roots that makes a natural shelter. Sothat it was quite natural that Mr Whitmore should not know that he wasn'tthere.'

Grant moved over to where Searle's bed had been, and considered the water.

'How much current is there? If he had tripped over those roots in the darkand taken a header into the river, what would happen?'

'It's a horrid stream, the Rushmere, I admit. All pot-holes andunder-tows. And a bottom of what the Chief Constable calls "immemorialmud". But Searle could swim. Or so Walter Whitmore says.'

'Was he sober?'

'Cold, stone sober.'

'Then if he went into the water unconscious, where would you expect tofind his body?'

'Between here and Salcott. Depends on the amount of rain. We've had solittle lately that you'd normally find the river low, but they had acloudburst at Tunstall on Tuesday—out of the blue in the good old Englishfashion—and the Rushmere came down like a mill-race.'

'I see. What became of the camp stuff?'

'Walter Whitmore had it taken up to Trimmings.'

'I take it that Searle's normal belongings are still at Trimmings.'

'I expect so.'

'Perhaps I had better take a look through them tonight. If there wasanything interesting to us among them it will have gone by now, but theymay be suggestive. Had Searle been on good terms with the otherinhabitants of Salcott, do you know?'

'Well, I hear there was a scene about a fortnight ago. A dancer chap flunga mug of beer over him.'

'Why?' asked Grant, identifying the 'dancer chap' without difficulty.Marta was a faithful recorder of Salcott history.

'He didn't like the attentions that Toby Tullis was paying to Searle, sothey say.'

'Did Searle?'

'No, if all reports are true,' Rodgers said, his anxious face relaxing toa moment's amusement.

'So Tullis wouldn't love him very much either?'

'Perhaps not.'

'You haven't had time, I suppose, to get round to alibis.'

'No. It wasn't until early evening that we found it might be more than asimple case of missing. Up till then it was a simple matter of drag andsearch. When we found what was turning up we wanted outside help and sentfor you.'

'I'm glad you sent so soon. It's a great help to be there when the tapesgo up. Well, I don't think there is anything else we can do here. We hadbetter get back to Wickham, and I'll take over.'

Rodgers dropped them at the White Hart, and left them with assurances ofany help that was within his power.

'Good man, that,' Grant said, as they climbed the stairs to inspect theirrooms under the roof—rooms with texts in wools and floweredwall-paper—'he ought to be at the Yard.'

'It's a queer set-up, isn't it?' Williams said, firmly taking the pokierof the two rooms. 'The rope trick in an English meadow. What do you thinkhappened to him, sir?'

'I don't know about "rope trick", but it does smell strongly ofsleight-of-hand. Now you see it, now you don't. The old conjurer's trickof the distracted attention. Ever seen a lady sawn in half, Williams?'

'Many's the time.'

'There's a strong aroma of sawn lady about this. Or don't you smell it?'

'I haven't got your nose, sir. All I see is a very queer set-up. A springnight in England, and a young American goes missing in the mile betweenthe village and the river. You really think he might have ducked, sir?'

'I can't think of any adequate reason why he should, but perhaps Whitmorecan.'

'I expect he will be very anxious to,' Williams said dryly.

But oddly enough Walter Whitmore showed no anxiety to put forward any suchtheory. On the contrary, he scorned it. It was absurd, he said, manifestlyabsurd, to suggest that Searle should have left of his own accord. Quiteapart from the fact that he was very happy, he had a very profitable dealto look forward to. He had been enormously enthusiastic about the bookthey were doing together, and it was fantastic to suggest that he wouldjust walk out like that.

Grant had come to Trimmings after dinner, tactfully allowing for the factthat dinner at Trimmings must be very late on broadcast day. He had sentin word to ask if Mr Whitmore would see Alan Grant, and had not mentionedhis business until he was face to face with Walter.

His first thought on seeing Walter Whitmore in the flesh was how mucholder he looked than he had expected; and then wondered whether it wasthat Walter looked much older than he had done on Wednesday. He lookeddisorientated, Grant thought; adrift. Something had happened to him thatdid not belong to the world he knew and recognised.

But he took Grant's announcement of his identity calmly.

'I was almost expecting you,' he said, offering cigarettes. 'Not youpersonally, of course. Just a representative of what has come to be knownas the Higher Levels.'

Grant had asked about their trip down the Rushmere, so as to set himtalking; if you got a man to talk enough he lost his defensive quality.Whitmore was drawing too hard on his cigarette but talking quite freely.Before he had actually reached their Wednesday evening visit to the Swan,Grant deflected him. It was too early yet to ask him about that night.

'You don't really know much about Searle, do you,' he pointed out. 'Hadyou heard of him at all before he turned up at that party of Ross's?'

'No, I hadn't. But that isn't strange. Photographers are two a penny.Almost as common as journalists. There was no reason why I should haveheard of him.'

'You have no reason to believe that he may not be what he representedhimself to be?'

'No, certainly not. I may never have heard of him, but Miss Easton-Dixoncertainly had.'

'Miss Easton-Dixon?'

'One of our local authors. She writes fairy-tales, and is a film addict.Not only did she know about Searle but she has a photograph.'

'A photograph?' Grant said, startled and pleased.

'In one of those film magazines. I haven't seen it myself. She talkedabout it one night when she came to dinner.'

'And she met Searle when she came to dinner? And identified him?'

'She did. They had a wonderful get-together. Searle had photographed someof her pet actors, and she had reproductions of them too.'

'So there is no doubt in your mind that Searle is what he says he is.'

'I notice you use the present tense, Inspector. That cheers me.' But hesounded more ironic than cheered.

'Have you yourself any theory as to what could have happened, MrWhitmore?'

'Short of fiery chariots or witches' broomsticks, no. It is the mostbaffling thing.'

Grant caught himself thinking that Walter Whitmore, too, was moved tothink of sleight-of-hand.

'The most reasonable explanation, I suppose,' Walter went on, 'is that helost his way in the dark and fell into the river at some other spot, whereno one would hear him.'

'And why don't you approve of that theory?' Grant asked, answering thetone that Whitmore used.

'Well, for one thing, Searle had eyes like a cat. I had slept out with himfor four nights, and I know. He was wonderful in the dark. Secondly he hadan extra-good bump of locality. Thirdly he was by all accounts cold soberwhen he left the Swan. Fourthly it is a bee-line from Salcott to theriver-bank where we were camped, by the hedges all the way. You can'tstray, because if you walk away from the hedge you walk into plough orcrop of some kind. And lastly, though this is hearsay evidence, Searlecould swim very well indeed.'

'There is a suggestion, Mr Whitmore, that you and Searle were on bad termson Wednesday evening. Is there any truth in that?'

'I thought we should get to that sooner or later,' Walter said. He pressedthe half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray until it was a misshapen wreck.

'Well?' Grant prompted, as he seemed to have nothing more to say.

'We had what might be called a—a "spat", I suppose. I was—annoyed.Nothing more than that.'

'He annoyed you so much that you left him at the pub and walked back byyourself.'

'I like being by myself.'

'And you went to sleep without waiting for his return.'

'Yes. I didn't want to talk to him any more that night. He annoyed me, Itell you. I thought that I might be in a better humour and he in a lessprovocative mood in the morning.'

'He was provocative?'

'I think that is the word.'

'About what?'

'I don't have to tell you that.'

'You don't have to tell me anything, Mr Whitmore.'

'No, I know I don't. But I want to be as helpful as I can. God knows Iwant this thing cleared up as soon as possible. It is just that whatwe—disagreed about is something personal and irrelevant. It has nobearing whatever on anything that happened to Searle on Wednesday night.I certainly didn't lie in wait for him on the way home, or push him intothe river, or subject him to violence.'

'Do you know of anyone who would be likely to want to?'

Whitmore hesitated; presumably with Serge Ratoff in his mind.

'Not that kind of violence,' he said at length.

'Not what kind?'

'Not that waiting-in-the-dark kind.'

'I see. Just the ordinary sock-in-the-jaw kind. There was a scene withSerge Ratoff, I understand.'

'Anyone who gets through life in close proximity to Serge Ratoff anddoesn't have a scene with him must be abnormal,' Walter said.

'You don't know of anyone who might have a grudge against Searle?'

'No one in Salcott. I don't know anything of his friends or enemieselsewhere.'

'Have you any objection to my looking through Searle's belongings?'

'I haven't, but Searle might. What do you expect to find, Inspector?'

'Nothing specific. A man's belongings are very revealing, I find. I ammerely looking for suggestion of some sort; help of any kind in a verypuzzling situation.'

'I'll take you up now, then—unless there is anything else you want to askme.'

'No, thank you. You have been very helpful. I wish you could have trustedme far enough to tell me what the quarrel was about——'

'There was no quarrel!' Whitmore said sharply.

'I beg your pardon. I mean, in what way Searle riled you. It would tell meeven more about Searle than it would about you; but perhaps it is too muchto expect you to see that.'

Whitmore stood by the door, considering this. 'No,' he said slowly. 'No, Ido see what you mean. But to tell you involves—— No, I don't think I cantell you.'

'I see you can't. Let us go up.'

As they emerged into the baronial hall from the library where theinterview had taken place, Liz had just come out of the drawing-room andwas crossing to the stairs. When she saw Grant she paused and her facelighted with joy.

'Oh!' she said, 'you've come with news of him!'

When Grant said no, that he had no news, she looked puzzled.

'But it was you who introduced him,' she insisted. 'At that party.'

This was news to Walter and Grant could feel his surprise. He could alsofeel his resentment at that flash of overwhelming joy on Liz's face.

'This, Liz dear,' he said in a cool, faintly malicious tone, 'is DetectiveInspector Grant from Scotland Yard.'

'From the Yard! But—you were at that party!'

'It is not unheard of for policemen to be interested in the arts,' Grantsaid, amused. 'But——'

'Oh, please! I didn't mean it that way.'

'I had only looked in at the party to pick up a friend. Searle wasstanding by the door looking lost because he didn't know Miss Fitch bysight. So I took him over and introduced them. That is all.'

'And now you've come down here to—to investigate—'

'To investigate his disappearance. Have you any theories, Miss Garrowby?'

'I? No. Not even a rudimentary one. It just doesn't make sense. It'sfantastically senseless.'

'If it isn't too late may I talk to you for a little when I have beenthrough Searle's belongings?'

'No, of course it isn't too late. It isn't ten o'clock yet.' She soundedweary. 'Since this happened time stretches out and out. It's likehaving—hashish, is it? Are you looking for anything in particular,Inspector?'

'Yes,' Grant said. 'Inspiration. But I doubt if I shall find it.'

'I shall be in the library when you come down. I hope you will findsomething that will help. It is very dreadful being suspended from aspider's thread this way.'

As he went through Searle's belongings Grant thought about LizGarrowby—Marta's 'dear nice Liz'—and her relations with William's'push-ee'. There was never any saying what a woman saw in any man, andWhitmore was of course a celebrity as well as a potentially good husband.He had said as much to Marta, coming away from the party that day. But howright had Marta been about Searle's power to upset? How much had LizGarrowby felt Searle's charm? How much of that eager welcome of hers inthe hall had been joy at Searle's imagined safety and how much mere relieffrom the burden of suspicion and gloom?

His hands turned over Searle's things with automatic efficiency, but hismind was busy deciding how much or how little to ask Liz Garrowby when hewent downstairs again.

Searle had occupied a first-floor room in the battlemented tower thatstuck out to the left of the Tudor front door, so that it had windows onthree sides of it. It was large and high, and was furnished in verysuperior Tottenham Court Road, a little too gay and coy for its Victorianamplitude. It was an impersonal room and Searle had evidently done nothingto stamp it with his personality. This struck Grant as odd. He had rarelyseen a room, occupied for so long, so devoid of atmosphere. There werebrushes on the table, and books by the bedside, but of their owner therewas no trace. It might have been a room in a shop window.

Of course it had been swept and tidied since last it was occupied six daysago. But still. But still.

The feeling was so strong that Grant paused to look round and consider. Hethought of all the rooms he had searched in his time. They had all—eventhe hotel rooms—been redolent of their late occupier. But here wasnothing but emptiness. An impersonal blank. Searle had kept hispersonality to himself.

Grant noticed, as Liz had noticed on that first day, how expensive hisclothes and luggage were. As he turned over the handkerchiefs in the topdrawer he noticed that they had no laundry mark, and wondered a little.Done at home, perhaps. The shirts and linen were marked but the mark wasold and probably American.

As well as the two leather suitcases, there was a japanned tin case like avery large paint-box, with the name 'L. Searle' in white letters on thelid. It was fitted with a lock but was unfastened and Grant lifted the lidwith some curiosity, only to find that it was filled with Searle'sphotographic material. It was built on the lines of a paint-box, with atop tray that was made to lift out. Grant hooked out the top tray with hisforefingers and surveyed the deeper compartment below it. The lowercompartment was full except for an oblong of empty space where somethinghad been taken out. Grant put down the tray he was holding and went tounroll the camp outfit that had been brought back from the riverbank. Hewanted to know what fitted into that oblong space.

But there was nothing that fitted.

There were two small cameras in the pack and some rolls of film. Neitherseparately nor together did they fit into the space in the tin box. Nordid anything else in the pack.

Grant came back and stood for some time considering that empty space.Something roughly 10 inches by 3-1/2 by 4 had been taken out. And it hadbeen taken out when the box was in its present position. Any heaving aboutof the box would have dislodged the other objects from their packedposition and obliterated the empty space.

He would have to ask about that when he went downstairs.

Meanwhile, having given the room a quick going-over, he now went over itin detail. Even so, he nearly missed the vital thing. He had run throughthe rather untidy handkerchief-and-ties drawer and was in the act ofclosing it, when something among the ties caught his attention and hepicked it out.

It was a woman's glove. A very small woman's glove.

A glove about Liz Garrowby's size.

Grant looked for its mate but there was none. It was the usual lover'strophy.

So the beautiful young man had been sufficiently attracted to steal one ofhis beloved's gloves. Grant found it oddly endearing. An almost Victoriangesture. Nowadays fetish-worship took much more sinister forms.

Well, whatever the glove proved, it surely proved that Searle had meant tocome back. One does not leave stolen love-objects in one's tie-drawer tobe exposed to the unsympathetic gaze of the stranger.

The question to be decided was: whose glove, and how much or how littledid it mean?

Grant put it in his pocket and went downstairs. Liz was waiting for him inthe library as she had promised, but he noticed that she had had company.No one person could have smoked so many cigarettes as the ends in theash-tray indicated. Grant deduced that Walter Whitmore had been inconsultation with her over this affair of police interrogation.

But Liz had not forgotten that she was also a secretary and officialreceptionist for Trimmings, and she had caused drinks to be brought. Grantrefused them because he was on duty, but approved of her effort on hisbehalf.

'I suppose this is only a beginning,' Liz said, indicating the WickhamTimes (once weekly every Friday) which was lying open on the table.*Young Man Missing*, said a modest headline in an inconspicuous position.And Walter was referred to as Mr Walter Whitmore, of Trimmings, Salcott StMary, the well-known commentator.

'Yes,' Grant said. 'The daily Press will have it tomorrow.'

*Whitmore's Companion Drowned*, they would say tomorrow, on the frontpage. *Whitmore Mystery. Friend of Whitmore Disappears.*

'It is going to be very bad for Walter.'

'Yes. Publicity is suffering from a sort of inflation. Its power is out ofall proportion to its worth.'

'What do you think happened to him, Inspector? To Leslie?'

'Well, for a time I had a theory that he might have disappeared of his ownaccord.'

'Voluntarily! But why?'

'That I wouldn't know without knowing more about Leslie Searle. You don'tthink, for instance, that he was the type to play a practical joke?'

'Oh, no. Quite definitely not. He wasn't that kind at all. He was veryquiet and—and had excellent taste. He wouldn't see anything funny inpractical joking. Besides, where could he disappear to with all hisbelongings left behind? He would have only what he stood up in.'

'About those belongings. Did you ever happen to see inside the japannedtin box that belongs to him?'

'The photographic box. I think I must have once. Because I rememberthinking how neatly packed everything was.'

'Something has been taken out of the lower compartment, and I can't findanything that fits the space. Would you be able to tell what is missing,do you think?'

'I'm sure I shouldn't. I don't remember anything in detail. Only theneatness. It was chemical stuff, and slides, and things like that.'

'Did he keep it locked?'

'It did lock, I know. Some of the stuff was poisonous. But I don't thinkit was kept permanently locked. Is it locked now?'

'No. Otherwise I shouldn't have known about the empty space.'

'I thought policemen could open anything.'

'They can, but they may not.'

She smiled a little and said: 'I was always in trouble with that atschool.'

'By the way,' he said, 'do you recognise this glove?' And produced it fromhis pocket.

'Yes,' she said, mildly interested. 'It looks like one of mine. Where didyou find it?'

'In Searle's handkerchief drawer.'

It was exactly like touching a snail, he thought. The instant closing-upand withdrawal. One moment she was frank and unselfconscious. The nextmoment she was startled and defensive.

'How odd,' she said, through a tight throat. 'He must have picked it upand meant to give it back to me. I keep a spare pair in the pocket of thecar, a respectable pair, and drive in old ones. Perhaps one of myrespectable pair dropped out one day.'

'I see.'

'That one, certainly, is one of the kind I keep in the car pocket.Presentable enough to go calling or shopping with but not too grand foreveryday wear.'

'Do you mind if I keep it for a little?'

'No, of course not. Is it an "exhibit"?' It was a gallant effort to soundlight.

'Not exactly. But anything that was in Searle's room is of potential valueat the moment.'

'I think that glove is more likely to mislead you than help you,Inspector. But keep it by all means.'

He liked the touch of spirit, and was glad of her quick recovery. He hadnever enjoyed teasing snails.

'Would Mr Whitmore be able to tell what is missing from that case?'

'I doubt it, but we can see.' She made for the door to summon Walter.

'Or anyone else in the household?'

'Well, Aunt Lavinia wouldn't. She never knows even what is in her owndrawers. And Mother wouldn't, because she never goes near the tower roomexcept to put her head in to see that the bed had been done and the placedusted. But we can ask the staff.'

Grant took them up to the tower bedroom and showed them what he meantabout the empty space. What had lain in that oblong gap?

'Some chemical that he has already used up?' Walter suggested.

'I thought of that, but all the necessary chemicals are still there andhardly used at all. You can't think of anything that you have seen himwith that would fill that gap?'

They could not; and neither could Alice the housemaid.

No one did Mr Searle's room but her, she said. A Mrs Clamp came from thevillage every day to help, but she did not do bedrooms. Just stairs andcorridors and offices and that.

Grant watched their faces and speculated. Whitmore was poker-faced; Lizhalf interested by the puzzle, half troubled; Alice apprehensive that shemight be held responsible for whatever was missing from the case.

He was getting nowhere.

Whitmore came to the front door with him, and peering into the dark said:'Where is your car?'

'I left it down the avenue,' Grant said, 'Goodnight, and thank you forbeing so helpful.'

He moved away into the darkness and waited while Walter closed the door.Then he walked round the house to the garage. It was still open, and itheld three cars. He tried the pockets of all three, but none of them heldan odd glove. None of them held any gloves whatever.

10

Williams was sitting in the corner of the coffee-room at the White Hart,consuming a late supper; and the landlord greeted Grant and went away tobring supper for him too. Williams, with the aid of the local police, hadspent a long, tiring, and unproductive afternoon and evening on Grant'stheory that Searle might have, for reasons of his own, disappeared. At teno'clock, having interviewed his twenty-third bus conductor, and the lastavailable railway porter, he had called it a day, and was now relaxed overbeer and sausage-and-mashed.

'Not a thing,' he said, in answer to Grant's question. 'No one evenremotely like him. Any luck with you, sir?'

'Nothing that makes the situation any clearer.'

'No letters among his belongings?'

'Not one. They must be all in his wallet, if he has any at all. Nothingbut packets of photographs.'

'Photographs?' Williams's ears pricked.

'Local ones that he has taken since he came here.'

'Oh. Any of Walter Whitmore's girl, by any chance?'

'A very great number indeed.'

'Yes? Posed ones?'

'No, Williams, no. Romantic. Her head against a sunlit sky with a spray ofalmond blossom across it. That kind of thing.'

'Is she photogenic, would you say? A blonde?'

'No, she is a small, dark, plainish creature with a nice face.'

'Oh. What does he want to go on photographing her for? Must be in lovewith her.'

'I wonder,' Grant said; and was silent while food was put in front of him.

'You really ought, just for once, to try those pickles, sir,' Williamssaid. 'They're wonderful.'

'For the five hundred and seventh time, I do not eat pickles. I have apalate, Williams. A precious possession. And I have no intention ofprostituting it to pickles. There was something among Searle's things thatwas a great deal more suggestive than any photograph.'

'What, sir?'

'One of the girl's gloves,' Grant said; and told him where it had beenfound.

'Well, well,' Williams said, and chewed the information over in silencefor a little. 'Doesn't sound as if it had gone very far.'

'What?'

'The affair. If he was still at the stage of stealing her glove. Honestly,sir, in this day and age I didn't imagine that anyone was driven to makingdo with a glove.'

Grant laughed. 'I told you. She is a nice girl. Tell me, Williams, whatkind of object would fit a space 10 inches by 3-1/2 by 4?'

'A bar of soap,' said Williams without hesitation.

'Unlikely. What else?'

'Box of cigarettes?'

'No. Not a smoker.'

'Food of some kind? Processed cheese is that shape.'

'No.'

'Revolver? Revolver in a case, I mean.'

'I wonder. Why should he have a revolver?'

'What space are you trying to fill, sir?' Williams asked, and Grantdescribed the photographic box, and the gap in the neatly fittedcompartment.

'Whatever had been there was something solid, so that the outline was hardand clear. Nothing that was still available among his belongings fittedthe gap. So either he took it out and got rid of it, or it was removed forsome reason after he had disappeared.'

'That would mean that someone at Trimmings is suppressing evidence. Youstill think Whitmore not the type, sir?'

'Type?'

'Not the bumping-off type.'

'I think Whitmore would be more liable to get into a pet than to see red.'

'But he wouldn't need to see red to drown Searle. A shove when he was in apet would have done it, and he mightn't have been able to do anythingabout rescue in the dark. Then he might lose his head and pretend he knewnothing about it. Heaven knows that happens often enough.'

'You think Whitmore did it but did it in half-accident?'

'I don't know who did it. But it's my firm conviction that Searle is stillin the river, sir.'

'But Inspector Rodgers says he dragged it thoroughly.'

'The sergeant in charge at Wickham Police Station says the mud in the bedof the Rushmere goes half-way to Australia.'

'Yes. I know. The Chief Constable, I understand, made the same observationin a less vivid phrase.'

'After all,' Williams said not listening, 'what could have become of himif he didn't drown? If all reports are true he wasn't a type you look atand never remember.'

No. That was true. Grant thought of the young man who had stood in CormacRoss's doorway, and reflected how little the official description of themissing man conveyed the individual they were looking for.

A man, in his early twenties, five feet eight-and-a-half or nine inches, slim build, very fair, grey eyes, straight nose, cheek bones rather high, wide mouth; hatless; wearing belted mackintosh over grey tweed jacket, grey pullover, blue sports shirt, and grey flannels, brown American shoes with instep buckle instead of lacing; low voice with American accent.

No one reading that description would visualise the actuality that wasLeslie Searle. On the other hand, as Williams pointed out, no one couldset eyes on the actual Searle and not look back for a second glance. Noone would see him and not remember.

'Besides, what could he want to disappear for?' persisted Williams.

'That I can't guess without knowing much more of his background. I mustget the Yard on to it first thing tomorrow. There's a female cousinsomewhere in England, but it is his American background that I want toknow about. I can't help feeling that the bumping-off trade is more nativeto California than it is to the B.B.C.'

'No one from California took whatever it was from Searle's case,' Williamspointed out.

'No,' Grant said, contemplative; and went over the inhabitants ofTrimmings in his mind. Tomorrow he would have to begin the collection ofalibis. Williams was of course right. It was unlikely to the point offantasy that Searle should have disappeared in such a manner of his ownaccord. He had suggested to Liz Garrowby that Searle might have planned apractical joke for Walter's discomfiture, and Liz had scorned thesuggestion. But even if Liz had been wrong in her estimate, how couldSearle have done it?

'There is still your passing motorist,' he said aloud.

'What's that, sir?'

'We have interviewed the people on the regular transport services, but wehave had no way yet of reaching the casual motorist who might have givenhim a lift.'

Williams, dilated with sausage and beer, smiled benevolently on him. 'Youmake the Fifty-seventh look like a girl's school, sir.'

'The Fifty-seventh?'

'You die awfully hard. You still in love with that theory about hisducking of his own accord?'

'I still think that he could have walked on from the river bend, up acrossthe fields, to the main Wickham-Crome road and got a lift there. I'll askBryce in the morning if we could have a radio S.O.S. about it.'

'And after he got the lift, sir? What then? All his luggage is atTrimmings.'

'We don't know that. We don't know anything about him before he walkedinto that party of Ross's. He is a photographer; that is all we know forcertain. He says he has only a female cousin in England but he may havehalf a dozen homes and a dozen wives for all we know.'

'Maybe, but why not go in a natural fashion when this trip was finished?After all, he would want to collect on that book they were doing, surely?Why all the mumbo-jumbo?'

'To make things awkward for Walter, perhaps.'

'Yes? You think that? Why?'

'Perhaps because I wouldn't mind making things awkward for Waltermyself,' Grant said with a half smile. 'Perhaps after all it is justwishful-thinking on my part.'

'It certainly is going to be very uncomfortable for Whitmore,' Williamssaid, without any noticeable regret.

'Very. Shouldn't wonder if it leads to civil war.'

'War?'

'The Faithful Whitmorites versus the Doubters.'

'Is he taking it hard?'

'I don't think he quite realises yet what has hit him. He won't, I think,until he sees the daily Press tomorrow morning.'

'Haven't the Press been at him already?'

'They haven't had time. The Clarion arrived on the doorstep at five thisafternoon, I understand, and went away to get information at the Swan whenhe failed to get it at Trimmings.'

'Trust the Clarion to be first. Whitmore would have done better to seewhoever it was. Why didn't he?'

'Waiting for his lawyer to arrive from town, so he said.'

'Who was it, do you know? The Clarion.'

'Jammy Hopkins.'

'Jammy! I'd as soon have a flame-thrower on my tail as Jammy Hopkins. Hehas no conscience whatever. He'll make up a story out of whole cloth if hedoesn't get an interview. You know, I begin to be sorry for WalterWhitmore. He couldn't really have given a thought to Jammy, or he wouldn'thave been so quick to shove Searle into the river.'

'And who is being Die-Hard now?' Grant said.

11

In the morning Grant telephoned to his chief, but he had no sooner begunhis story than Bryce interrupted him.

'That you, Grant? You send back that Man Friday of yours straight away.Benny Skoll cleaned out Poppy Plumtre's bedroom safe last night.'

'I thought all Poppy's valuables were with Uncle.'

'Not since she got herself a new daddy.'

'Are you sure that it's Benny?'

'Quite sure. It has all his trade-marks. The telephone call to get thehall porter out of the way, the lack of fingerprints, the bread-and-jamand milk meal, the exit by the service entrance. Short of signing his namein the visitors' book, he couldn't have written his signature more clearlyover it.'

'Ah, well; the day criminals learn to vary their technique we go out ofbusiness.'

'I need Williams to pick up Benny. Williams knows Benny like a book. Sosend him back. How are you doing?'

'Not too well.'

'No? How?'

'We have no corpse. So we have two possibilities: Searle is dead, eitherby accident or by design; or he has just disappeared for ends of his own.'

'What sort of ends?'

'Practical joke, perhaps.'

'He had better not try that stuff with us.'

'It might, of course, be plain amnesia.'

'It had better be.'

'There are two things I need, sir. A radio S.O.S. is one. And the other issome information from the San Francisco police about Searle. We areworking in the dark, knowing nothing about him. His only relation inEngland is a cousin; a woman artist, with whom he had no contact. Or sayshe hadn't. She will probably get in touch with us when she sees the papersthis morning. But she will probably know very little about him.'

'And you think the San Francisco police will know more?'

'Well, San Francisco was his headquarters, I understand, when he spent thewinter months on the Coast, and they can no doubt dig up something abouthim there. Let us know whether he ever was in any bother and if anyone wasliable to kill him for any reason.'

'A lot of people would like to kill a photographer, I should think. Yes,we'll do that.'

'Thank you, sir. And about the S.O.S.?'

'The B.B.C. don't like their nice little radio cluttered up with policemessages. What did you want to say?'

'I want to ask anyone who gave a lift to a young man between Wickham andCrome on Wednesday night to get in touch with us.'

'Yes, I'll see to that. I suppose you have covered all the regularservices?'

'Everything, sir. Not a sign of him anywhere. And he is hardlyinconspicuous. Short of his having a rendezvous with a waitingplane—which only happens in boys' stories, as far as I'm aware—the onlyway he could have got away from the district is by walking over the fieldsand getting a lift on the main road.'

'No evidence of homicide?'

'None so far. But I shall see what alibis the locals have, this morning.'

'You push Williams off before you do anything else. I'll send the SanFrancisco information to the Wickham Station when it comes through.'

'Very good, sir. Thank you.'

Grant hung up and went to tell Williams.

'Damn Benny,' Williams said. 'Just when I was beginning to like this bitof country. It's no day to wrestle with Benny anyhow.'

'Is he tough?'

'Benny? No! He's a horror. He'll cry and carry on and say that we arehounding him, and that he is no sooner out of stir and trying to makegood—"make good"! Benny!—than we are down on him to come and bequestioned, and what chance has he in the circs, and so on. He turns mystomach. If Benny saw an honest day's work coming his way he'd run for hislife. He's a wonderful cryer, though. He once got a question asked inParliament. You'd wonder how some of those M.P.s ever had brains enough toask for a railway ticket from their home towns. Have I got to take atrain to town?'

'I expect Rodgers will give you a car to Crome and you can get a fasttrain there,' Grant said, smiling at the horror on his colleague's face atthe thought of train travel. He himself went back to the telephone andcalled Marta Hallard at the Mill House in Salcott St Mary.

'Alan!' she said. 'How nice. Where are you?'

'At the White Hart in Wickham.'

'You poor dear!'

'Oh, it isn't too bad.'

'Don't be so noble. You know it is primitive to the point of beingpenitential. Have you heard about our latest sensation, by the way?'

'I have. That is why I am in Wickham.'

There was a complete silence at that.

Then Marta said: 'You mean the Yard are interested in Leslie Searle'sdrowning?'

'In Searle's disappearance, let us say.'

'You mean, that there is some truth in this rumour of a quarrel withWalter?'

'I'm afraid I can't discuss it over the telephone. What I wanted to askyou was whether you would be at home this evening if I came along.'

'But you must come and stay, of course. You can't stay at that drearyplace. I'll tell Mrs——'

'Thank you with all my heart, but I can't do that. I must be here inWickham at the centre of things. But if you like to give me dinner——'

'Of course I shall give you dinner. You shall have a beautiful meal, mydear. With one of my omelets and one of Mrs Thrupp's chickens, and abottle from the cellar that will take the taste of the White Hart beer outof your mouth.'

So, a little heartened at the prospect of civilisation at the end of theday, Grant went out on his day's task, and he began with Trimmings. Ifthere was to be a reckoning of alibis it was fitting that the inhabitantsof Trimmings should be the first to give an account of themselves.

It was a fine blue morning, growing soft after an early frost, and no day,as Williams had pointed out, to waste on the Bennys of this life; but thesight of Trimmings standing up unblushingly in the bright sunlightrestored Grant's wavering good humour. Last night it had been a lighteddoorway in the dark. Today it stood revealed, extravagantly monstrous, inall its smug detail, and Grant was so enraptured that his foot came downon the brake and he brought the car to a standstill at the curve of thedrive, and sat there gazing.

'I know just how you are feeling,' a voice said at his elbow. And therewas Liz; a little heavy-eyed, he noticed, but otherwise calm and friendly.

'Good morning,' he said. 'I was a little dashed this morning because Icouldn't drop everything and go fishing. But I feel better now.'

'It is a beauty, isn't it,' she agreed. 'You don't quite believe it isthere at all. You feel that no one could possibly have thought it up; itjust appeared.'

Her thoughts shifted from the house to his presence, and he saw thequestion coming.

'I am sorry to be a nuisance, but I am busy this morning getting rid ofthe undergrowth in this case.'

'Undergrowth?'

'I want to get rid of all the people who can't possibly enter into thecase at all.'

'I see. You are collecting alibis.'

'Yes.' He opened the car door, so that she might ride the short distanceto the house.

'Well, I hope we have good ones. I regret to say that I haven't one atall. It was the first thing I thought of when I knew who you were. It'svery odd, isn't it, how guilty an innocent person feels when he can'taccount for himself on the umpteenth inst. Do you want everyone's alibi?Aunt Lavinia's and mother's and all?'

'And those of the staff, too. Of everyone who had any connection withLeslie Searle.'

'Well, you had better start with Aunt Vin. Before she begins her morningchore. She dictates for two hours every morning, and she likes to beginpunctually.'

'Where were you, Miss Garrowby?' he asked as they arrived at the door.

'At the material time?' He thought she was being deliberately cold-bloodedabout it; the 'material time' was when Leslie Searle had presumably losthis life, and he did not think that she was forgetting that fact.

'Yes. On Wednesday night.'

'I had what they call in detective stories "retired to my room". And don'ttell me that it was "early to retire", either. I know it was. I like goingupstairs early. I like being alone at the end of the day.'

'Do you read?'

'Don't tell, Inspector, but I write.'

'You too?'

Do I disappoint you?'

'You interest me. What do you write—or shouldn't I ask?'

'I write innocuous heroines out of my system, that's all.'

'Tilda the tweeny with the hare-lip and the homicidal tendencies, asantidote to Maureen.'

She looked at him for a long moment and then said: 'You are a very oddsort of policeman.'

'I suspect that it is your idea of policemen that is odd,' Grant saidbriskly. 'Will you tell your aunt that I am here?'

But there was no need to announce him. Miss Fitch was in the hall as Lizran up the steps, and she said in tones more surprised than grieved:

'Liz, you are five minutes late!' Then she saw the Inspector, and said:'Well, well, they were right. They said that no one would ever take youfor a policeman. Come in, Inspector. I have wanted so much to meet you.Officially, as it were. Our last encounter could hardly be termed ameeting, could it. Come into the morning-room. That is where I work.'

Grant apologised for keeping her from her morning's dictation, but sheprofessed herself glad to postpone for at least ten minutes her businesswith 'the tiresome girl'. Grant took the 'tiresome girl' to be the currentFitch heroine.

Miss Fitch, too, it seemed, had retired early on Wednesday night. Athalf-past nine, to be exact.

'When a family are in each other's pocket all day long, as we are,' shesaid, 'they tend to go to their rooms early at night.' She had watched aradio play, and had lain awake a little, half-listening for her sistercoming in, but had fallen asleep quite early after all.

'Coming in?' Grant said. 'Was Mrs Garrowby out, then?'

'Yes. She was at a W.R.I. meeting.'

He asked her about Searle, then. What she had thought of him, and what inher opinion he was liable to do or not to do. She was surprisingly guardedabout Searle, he thought; as if she were picking her steps; and hewondered why.

When he said: 'Did Searle, in your opinion, show signs of being in lovewith your niece?' she looked startled, and said 'No, of course not!' tooquickly and too emphatically.

'He did not pay her attentions?'

'My dear man,' Miss Fitch said, 'any American pays a girl attentions. Itis a conditioned reflex. As automatic as breathing.'

'You think he was not seriously interested in her?'

'I am sure that he wasn't.'

'Your nephew told me last night that he and Searle had telephoned to youeach night on their way down the river.'

'Yes.'

'Did everyone in the household know about the message on Wednesday night?I mean, know where the two men were camped?'

'I expect so. The family certainly did; and the staff were always anxiousto hear about their progress so I suppose everyone knew.'

'Thank you very much, Miss Fitch. You have been very kind.'

She called Liz in, and Liz took him to her mother and went back to themorning-room to record the doings of the latest Maureen.

Mrs Garrowby was another person without an alibi. She had been at theW.R.I. meeting at the village hall, had left there when the meeting brokeup at half-past nine, had accompanied Miss Easton-Dixon part of the wayhome and had left her where their roads branched. She had come in aboutten; or later, perhaps: she had strolled home because it was a lovelynight; and had locked up the front of the house. The back door was alwayslocked by Mrs Brett, the cook-housekeeper.

Emma Garrowby did not fool Grant for a moment. He had met her counterparttoo often; that ruthless maternalism masquerading in a placid exterior.Had Searle got in the way of plans she had made for her daughter?

He asked her about Searle, and there was no step-picking at all. He hadbeen a charming young man, she said. Quite exceptionally charming. Theyall liked him enormously, and were shattered by this tragedy.

Grant caught himself receiving this mentally with an expressivemonosyllable.

He felt a little suffocated by Mrs Garrowby, and was glad when she wentaway to find Alice for him.

Alice had been walked-out on Wednesday night by the under-gardener, andhad come in at a quarter past ten, whereupon the door had been lockedbehind her by Mrs Brett, and they had gone up together, after having a cupof cocoa, to their rooms in the back wing. Alice really was shattered bythe fate that had overtaken Leslie Searle. Never, she said, had she had todo for a nicer young man. She had met dozens of young men, gentlemen andothers, who considered a girl's ankles, but Mr Searle was the only one shehad ever met who considered a girl's feet.

'Feet?'

She had said as much to Mrs Brett, and to Edith, the parlourmaid. He wouldsay: 'You can do this or that, and that will save you coming up again,won't it.' And she could only conclude that this was an Americancharacteristic, because no Englishman she had ever come across had evercared two hoots whether you had to come up again or not.

Edith, too, it seemed, mourned for Leslie Searle; not because heconsidered her feet but because he was so good-looking. Edith proved to bevery superior and refayned. Much too refayned to be walked out by anunder-gardener. She had gone to her room to watch the same play that hermistress was watching. She heard Mrs Brett and Alice come up to bed, butthe wing bedrooms were too far away to hear anyone come into the mainblock, so she did not know when Mrs Garrowby had come in.

Neither did Mrs Brett. After dinner, Mrs Brett said, the family did notworry the staff at all. Edith laid out the bed-time drinks, and after thatthe baize door in the hall was not normally opened again until thefollowing morning. Mrs Brett had been nine years with Miss Fitch, and MissFitch could trust her to manage the staff and the staff premises.

When Grant went to the front door on his way to the car he found WalterWhitmore propped against the terrace wall. He bade Grant good morning andhoped that the alibis had been satisfactory.

It seemed to Grant that Walter Whitmore was visibly deteriorating. Eventhe few hours since last night had made a difference. He wondered how mucha reading of this morning's papers had contributed to the slackening ofWalter's facial structure.

'Have the Press been hounding you yet?' he asked.

'They were here just after breakfast.'

'Did you talk to them?'

'I saw them, if that is what you mean. There wasn't much I could say.They'll get far more copy down at the Swan.'

'Did your lawyer come?'

'Yes. He's asleep.'

'Asleep!'

'He left London at half-past five, and saw me through the interview. Hehad to leave things in a hurry so he didn't get to bed last night till twothis morning. If you take my meaning.'

Grant left him with an illogical feeling of relief and went down to theSwan. He ran his car into the paved brick yard at the rear of it andknocked at the side door.

A bolt was drawn with noisy impatience, and Reeve's face appeared in thegap. 'It's not a bit of use,' he said. 'You'll have to wait till openingtime.'

'As a policeman, I appreciate that snub at its true value,' Grant said.'But I'd like to come in and talk to you for a moment.'

'You look more Service than Police, if you ask me,' said the ex-Marine,amused, as he led the way into the bar parlour. 'You're the spit of aMajor we had with us Up The Straights once. Vandaleur was his name. Evercome across him?'

Grant had not come across Major Vandaleur.

'Well, what can I do for you, sir? It's about this Searle affair, I takeit.'

'Yes. You can do two things for me. I want your considered opinion—and Imean considered—on the relations between Whitmore and Searle on Wednesdayevening. And I should like a list of all the people in the bar that nightand the times they left.'

Reeve had all a service man's objective attitude to a happening. He had nodesire to dress it up, or to make it reflect his own personality as anartist did. Grant felt himself relaxing. It was almost like listening tothe report of one of his own men. There was no obvious ill-feeling betweenthe men, Reeve said. He would not have noticed them at all, if they hadnot been isolated by the fact that no one moved away from the bar to jointhem. Normally, someone or other would have moved over to resume aconversation that had begun when they were at the bar together. But onWednesday there was something in their unconsciousness of the rest thatkept people from intruding.

'They were like two dogs walking round each other,' Reeve said. 'No row,but a sort of atmosphere. The row might burst out any minute, if you seewhat I mean.'

'Did you see Whitmore go?'

'No one did. The boys were having an argument about who played cricket forAustralia in what year. They paused when the door banged, that was all.Then Bill Maddox, seeing that Searle was alone, went over and talked tohim. Maddox keeps the garage at the end of the village.'

'Thanks. And now the list of those in the bar.'

Grant wrote the list down; county names, most of them, unchanged sinceDomesday Book. As he went out to get his car he said: 'Have you any Pressstaying in the house?'

'Three,' Reeve said. 'The Clarion, the Morning News, and the Post.They're all out now, sucking the village dry.'

'Also ran: Scotland Yard,' Grant said wryly, and drove away to see BillMaddox.

At the end of the village was a high clapboarded structure on which fadedpaint said: William Maddox and Son, Carpenters and Boatbuilders. At onecorner of this building a bright black and yellow sign pointed into theyard at the side and said simply: Garage.

'You manage to make the best of both worlds, I see,' he said to BillMaddox when he had introduced himself, and tilted his head at the sign.

'Oh, Maddox and Son is Father, not me.'

'I thought that perhaps you were "Son".'

Bill looked amused. 'Oh, no; my grandfather was Son. That's mygreatgrandfather's business. And still the best woodworkers this side ofthe county, though it's me that says it. You looking for information,Inspector?'

Grant got all the information Maddox could give him, and as he was goingaway Maddox said: 'You happen to know a newspaper-man called Hopkins, byany chance?'

'Hopkins of the Clarion? We have met.'

'He was round here for hours this morning, and do you know what that blokeactually believes? He believes that the whole thing is just a publicitystunt to sell that book they planned to write.'

The combination of this typically Hopkins reaction and Bill's bewilderedface was too much for Grant. He leant against the car and laughed.

'It's a debasing life, a journalist's,' he said. 'And Jammy Hopkins is aborn debase-ee, as a friend of mine would say.'

'Oh,' said Bill, still puzzled. 'Silly, I call it. Plain silly.'

'Do you know where I can find Serge Ratoff, by the way?'

'I don't suppose he's out of bed yet, but if he is you'll find himpropping up the counter of the post-office. The post-office is in theshop. Half-way up the street. Serge lives in the lean-to place next doorto it.'

But Serge had not yet reached his daily stance by the post-office counter.He was coming down the street from the newsagent's with a paper under hisarm. Grant had never seen him before, but he knew the occupational signswell enough to spot a dancer in a village street. The limp clothescovering an apparently weedy body, the general air of undernourishment,the wilting appearance that made one feel that the muscles must be flabbyas tired elastic. It was a never-ceasing amazement to Grant that theflashing creatures who tossed ballerinas about with no more effort than aslight gritting of teeth, went out of the stage door looking likeunder-privileged barrow boys.

He brought the car to a halt at the pavement as he came level with Serge,and greeted him.

'Mr Ratoff?'

'That is me.'

'I'm Detective-Inspector Grant. May I speak to you for a moment?'

'Everyone speaks to me,' Serge said complacently. 'Why not you?'

'It is about Leslie Searle.'

'Ah, yes. He has become drowned. Delightful.'

Grant offered some phrases on the virtue of discretion.

'Ah, discretion!' said Serge, making five syllables of it. 'A bourgeoisquality.'

'I understand that you had a quarrel with Searle.'

'Nothing of the sort.'

'But——'

'I fling a mug of beer in his face, that is all.'

'And you don't call that a quarrel?'

'Of course not. To quarrel is to be on a level, equal, how do you say,of the same rank. One does not quarrel with canaille. My grandfather inRussia would have taken a whip to him. This is England and decadent, andso I fling beer over him. It is a gesture, at least.'

When Grant recounted this conversation to Marta, she said: 'I can't thinkwhat Serge would do without that grandfather in Russia. His father leftRussia when he was three—Serge can't speak a word of Russian and he ishalf Neapolitan anyhow—but all his fantasies are built on thatgrandfather in Russia.'

'You will understand,' Grant said patiently, 'that it is necessary for thepolice to ask all those who knew Searle for an account of their movementson Wednesday night.'

'Is it? How tiresome for you. It is a sad life, a policeman's. Themovements. So limited, so rudimentary.' Serge made himself into asemaphore, and worked his arms marionette-wise in a travesty of point-dutysignals. 'Tiresome. Very tiresome. Lucid, of course, but withoutsubtlety.'

'Where were you on Wednesday night from nine o'clock onwards?' Grant said,deciding that an indirect approach was just a waste of time.

'I was dancing,' Serge said.

'Oh. At the village hall?'

Serge looked as if he were going to faint.

'You suggest that I, that I, Serge Ratoff, was taking part in a'op?'

'Then where were you dancing?'

'By the river.'

'What?'

'I work out the choreography for a new ballet. I burst with ideas there bythe river on a spring night. They rise up in me like fountains. There isso much atmosphere there that I get drunk on it. I can do anything. I workout a very charming idea to go with the river music of Mashako. It beginswith a——'

'What part of the river?'

'What?'

'What part of the river?'

'How should I know? The atmosphere is the same over all.'

'Well, did you go up river or down, from Salcott?'

'Oh, up, most certainly.'

'Why "most certainly"?'

'I need the wide flat spaces to dance. Up river they are there. Down riverfrom the village it is all steep banks and tiresome root crops. Roots.Clumsy, obscene things. They——'

'Could you identify the place where you were dancing on Wednesday night?'

'Identify?'

'Point it out to me.'

'How can I? I don't even remember where it was.'

'Can you remember if you saw anyone while you were there?'

'No one who was memorable?'

'Memorable?'

'I trip over lovers in the grass now and then, but they—how you say, gowith the house. They are part of the—the set-up. Not memorable.'

'Do you remember, then, what time you left the river bank on Wednesdaynight?'

'Ah, yes, that I remember perfectly.'

'When was it that you left?'

'When the shooting star fell.'

'What time was that?'

'How should I know? I dislike shooting stars. They make butterflies in mystomach. Though I did think that it would be a very fine ending to myballet to have a shooting star. A Spectre de la Rose leap, you know,that would set the town talking, and show them that I can still——'

'Mr Ratoff, can you suggest how Leslie Searle came to be in the river?'

'Came to be? He fell in, I suppose. Such a pity. Pollution. The river isso beautiful it should be kept for beautiful things. Ophelia. Shallott. Doyou think Shallott would make a ballet? All the things she sees in themirror? It is an idea, that, isn't it?'

Grant gave up.

He left his car where it was and walked up the street to where the flatstone front of Hoo House broke the pinks and chromes and limes of thevillage's plastered gables. The house stood on the pavement like the othercottages, but three steps to the front door raised the ground floor of thehouse above street level. It withdrew itself a little, in a dignityentirely natural, from everyday affairs. As Grant pulled the Victorianbell in its bright brass circle he spared a thought to bless the man,whoever he was, who had been responsible for restoring the place. He hadpreserved the structure but had made no attempt to turn it back into itsoriginal form and so make a museum piece of it; the tale of the centurieswas there, from the worn mounting-block to the brass bell. A great amountof money had obviously been spent to bring it to its present condition ofworthiness, and Grant wondered if perhaps the saving of Hoo House wassufficient to justify Toby Tullis's existence.

The door was opened by a manservant who might have walked out of one ofToby's plays. He stood in the doorway, polite but impenetrable; a one-manroad-block.

'Mr Tullis does not see anyone before lunch,' he said in answer to Grant'sinquiry. 'He works in the morning. The appointment with the Press is fortwo o'clock.' He began to move his hand towards the door.

'Do I look like Press?' Grant said tartly.

'Well—no, I can't say that you do—sir.'

'Shouldn't you have a little tray?' Grant said, suddenly silky.

The man turned submissively and took a silver card tray from the Jacobeanchest in the hall.

Grant dropped a piece of pasteboard on to the tray and said: 'Present mycompliments to Mr Tullis and say that I would be grateful for threeminutes of his time.'

'Certainly, sir,' said the man, not allowing his eyes to stray even to thevicinity of the card. 'Will you be kind enough to step into the hall andwait.'

He disappeared into a room at the rear of the house, and closed the doorbehind him on some very unworkmanlike sounds of chatter. But he was backin a moment. Would Inspector Grant come this way, please. Mr Tullis wouldbe very pleased to see him.

The room at the back, Grant found, looked into a large garden sloping downto the river-bank; it was another world altogether from the village streetthat he had just left. It was a sitting-room, furnished with the mostperfect 'pieces' that Grant had ever seen out of a museum. Toby, in aremarkable dressing-gown, was sitting behind an array of silver coffeethings; and behind him, in still more remarkable day clothes, hovered acallow and eager young man clutching a notebook. The notebook, from itsvirgin condition, appeared to be more a badge of office than the implementof a craft.

'You are modest, Inspector!' Toby said, greeting him.

'Modest?'

'Three minutes! Even the Press expect ten.'

It had been meant as a compliment to Grant, but the effect was merely areminder that Toby was the most-interviewed individual in theEnglish-speaking world and that his time was priceless. As always, whatToby did was a little 'off-key'.

He presented the young man as Giles Verlaine, his secretary, and offeredGrant coffee. Grant said that it was at once too late and too early forhim, but would Mr Tullis go on with his breakfast; and Toby did.

'I am investigating the disappearance of Leslie Searle,' Grant said. 'Andthat involves, I'm afraid, some disturbance of people who are onlyremotely connected with Searle. We have to ask everyone at Salcott whoknew Searle to account for their time, as far as they can, on Wednesdaynight.'

'Inspector, you offer me a felicity I had never hoped to enjoy. I havealways been madly desirous of being asked what I was doing at nine-thirtyp.m. on the night of Friday the 13th, but I never really dared to hopethat it would happen to me.'

'Now that it has happened, I hope your alibi is worthy of the occasion.'

'It has the virtue of simplicity, at least. Giles and I spent the hours ofthat lovely midnight discussing Act II, Scene 1. Pedestrian, Inspector,but necessary. I am a business man.'

Grant glanced from the business man to Giles, and decided that in hispresent stage of discipleship the young man would probably confess to themurder if it would pleasure Toby. A little thing like providing an alibiwould be merely routine.

'And Mr Verlaine corroborates that, of course,' Grant said.

'Yes, oh yes, of course; of course I do; yes,' said Giles, squanderingaffirmatives in the service of his patron.

'It is a tragic thing indeed, this drowning,' Toby said, sipping coffee.'The sum total of the world's beauty is not so great that we can afford towaste any. A Shelleyan end, of course, and to that extent fitting. Do youknow the Shelley Memorial at Oxford, Inspector?'

Grant knew the Memorial and it reminded him of an overboiled chicken, buthe refrained from saying so. Nor did Toby expect an answer.

'A lovely thing. Drowning is surely the ideal way of going out of thislife.'

'After a close acquaintance with a great variety of corpses taken from thewater, I can't say that I agree with you.'

Toby cocked a fish-scale eye at him, and said: 'Don't shatter myillusions, Inspector. You are worse than Silas Weekley. Silas is alwayspointing out the nastiness of life. Have you got Silas's alibi, by theway?'

'Not yet. I understand that he hardly knew Mr Searle.'

'That wouldn't stop Silas. I shouldn't wonder if he did it as a bit oflocal colour.'

'Local colour?'

'Yes. According to Silas country existence is one cesspool of rape,murder, incest, abortion, and suicide, and perhaps Silas thinks that it istime that Salcott St Mary lived up to his idea of it. Do you read ourSilas, Inspector?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Don't apologise. It's an acquired taste. Even his wife hasn't acquired ityet, if all reports are true. But then, poor woman, she is so busysuckling and suffering that she probably has no time to spare for theconsideration of the abstract. No one seems to have indicated to her thepossibilities of contraception. Of course, Silas has a "thing" aboutfertility. He holds that the highest function of a woman is themanufacture of progeny. So disheartening for a woman, don't you feel, tobe weighed against a rabbit, and to know that she will inevitably be foundwanting. Life, by Fertility out of Ugliness. That is how Silas sees it. Hehates beauty. Beauty is an offence. He must mash it down and make itfertile. Make mulch of it. Of course he is just a little crazy, poorsweet, but it is a very profitable kind of craziness, so one need notdrench oneself in tears about it. One of the secrets of a successful lifeis to know how to be a little profitably crazy.'

Grant wondered whether this was merely a normal sample of Toby's chatter,or whether it was designed to edge him on to Silas Weekley. Where a man'spersonality is entirely façade, as in the case of Toby Tullis, it wasdifficult to decide how much of the façade was barricade and how much wasmere poster-hoarding.

'You didn't see Searle at all on Wednesday evening?' he said.

No, Toby had not seen him. His time for the pub was before dinner, notafter.

'I don't want to be intrusive, Inspector, but there seems to me a needlessfurore over a simple drowning.'

'Why drowning?'

'Why not?'

'We have no evidence at all that Searle was drowned, and some fairlyconclusive evidence that he wasn't.'

'That he wasn't? What evidence have you that he wasn't?'

'The river has been dragged for his body.'

'Oh, that!'

'What we are investigating, Mr Tullis, is the disappearance of a man inSalcott St Mary on Wednesday night.'

'You really ought to see the vicar, Inspector. He has the perfect solutionfor you.'

'And what is that?'

'The dear vicar believes that Searle was never really here at all. Heholds that Searle was merely a demon who took human shape for a little,and disappeared when the joke grew stale or the—the juice ran dry, so tospeak.'

'Very interesting.'

'I suppose you never saw Searle, Inspector?'

'Oh, yes. I have met him.'

This surprised Toby so much that Grant was amused.

'The demon attended a party in Bloomsbury, just before he came toSalcott,' he said.

'My dear Inspector, you must see the vicar. This contribution to thepredilections of demons is of inestimable value to research.'

'Why did you ask me if I had ever seen Searle?'

'Because he was so perfectly what one would imagine a materialised demonto be.'

'His good-looks, you mean?'

'Was it only a question of good-looks?' Toby said, half quizzing half inchallenge.

'No,' said Grant. 'No.'

'Do you think Searle was a wrong 'un?' Toby said, forgetting the façadefor a moment and dropping into the vernacular.

'There is no evidence whatever on that score.'

'Ah, me,' Toby said, resuming the façade with a small mock-sigh. 'Theblank wall of bureaucratic caution. I have few ambitions left in life,Inspector, but one of them is a passionate desire to know what made LeslieSearle tick.'

'If I ever find out, bureaucratic caution will crack sufficiently to letyou know,' Grant said, getting up to go.

He stood for a moment looking out at the bright garden with the gleam ofthe river at the far end.

'This might be a country house, miles from anywhere,' he said.

Toby said that that was one of the charms of Hoo House, but that, ofcourse, most of the cottages on the river side of the street had gardensthat ran to the river, but most of them were broken into allotments ormarket gardens of some sort. It was the keeping of the Hoo House groundsas lawns and trees that made it spacious seeming.

'And the river makes a boundary without breaking the view. It is a sadlymixed blessing, the river.'

'Mosquitoes?'

'No; every now and then it has an overwhelming desire to get into thehouse. About once in every six winters it succeeds. My caretaker woke onemorning last winter to find the boat knocking against his bedroom window.'

'You keep a boat?'

'Just as a prop. A punt affair that is pleasant to lie in on summerafternoons.'

Grant thanked him for being so helpful, apologised once more for havingintruded on his breakfast, and took his leave. Toby showed signs ofwanting to show him the house, but Grant avoided that for three reasons:he had work to do, he had already seen most of the house in theillustrated press, and he had an odd reluctance to be shown the world'sfinest craftsmanship by a slick little operator like Toby Tullis.

12

Silas Weekly lived in a cottage down the lane that led to the far bendof the river. Or rather, that started off towards the river. The lane,where it met the fields, turned at right-angles along the back of thevillage, only to turn up again and rejoin the village street. It was anentirely local affair. In the last cottage before the fields lived SilasWeekley, and Grant, 'proceeding' there police-fashion, was surprised tofind it so poor a dwelling. It was not only that Weekley was a best-sellerand could therefore afford a home that was more attractive than this, butthere had been no effort to beautify the place; no generosity of paint andwash such as the other cottagers had used to make the street of Salcott StMary a delight to the eye. No window plants, no trim curtains. The placehad a slum air that was strange in its surroundings.

The cottage door was open and the combined howls of an infant and a childpoured out into the sunny morning. An enamel basin of dirty water stood inthe porch, the soap bubbles on it bursting one by one in slow resignation.An animal toy of soft fur, so worn and grubby as to be unidentifiable asany known species, lay on the floor. The room beyond was unoccupied forthe moment, and Grant stood observing it in a kind of wonder. It waspoorly furnished and untidy beyond belief.

The crying continued to come from some room in the rear, so Grant knockedloudly on the front door. At his second knock, a woman's voice called:'Just leave it there, thank you.' At his third knock supplemented with acall, she came from the darkness at the back and moved forward to inspecthim.

'Mrs Weekley?' Grant said doubtfully.

'Yes, I'm Mrs Weekley.'

She must have been pretty once. Pretty and intelligent; and independent.Grant remembered hearing somewhere that Weekley had married an elementaryschool teacher. She was wearing a sacking apron over a print wrapper, andthe kind of old shoes that a woman all too easily gets used to as goodenough to do chores in. She had not bothered to put on stockings, and theshoes had left smudges on her bare insteps. Her unwaved hair was pulledback into a tight desperate knot, but the front strands were too short tobe confined there for long and now hung down on either side of her face.It was a rather long face and very tired.

Grant said that he would like to see her husband for a moment.

'Oh.' She took it in slowly, as if her mind were still with the cryingchildren. 'I'm sorry things are so untidy,' she said vaguely. 'My girlfrom the village didn't come today. She often doesn't. It just depends onhow she is feeling. And with the children it is difficult——. I don'tthink I can disturb my husband in the middle of the morning.' Grantwondered whether she considered the children were making no disturbance atall. 'He writes in the morning, you see.'

'I see. But if you would give him my card I think he will see me.'

'Are you from the publishers?'

'No, I'm——'

'Because I think it would be better to wait, and not interrupt him. Hecould meet you at the Swan, couldn't he? Just before lunch, perhaps.'

'No, I'm afraid that I must see him. You see, it is a matter——'

'It is very important that he shouldn't be disturbed. It interrupts histrain of thought, and then he finds it difficult to—to get back. Hewrites very slowly—carefully, I mean—sometimes only a paragraph a day,so you see it is——'

'Mrs Weekley,' Grant said, bluntly, 'please give that card to your husbandand say that I must see him, whatever he happens to be doing.'

She stood with the card in her fingers, not even glancing at it, her mindobviously busy with the search for some excuse that would convince him.And he was all of a sudden aware that she was afraid to take that card toher husband. Afraid to interrupt him.

To help her, he said that surely there would be no interruption where thechildren had been making so much noise. Her husband could hardly beconcentrating very hard.

'Oh, he doesn't work here,' she said. 'In the house, I mean. He has alittle house of his own at the end of the garden.'

Grant took back the card she was holding, and said grimly: 'Will you showme the way, Mrs Weekley?'

Dumbly she led him through a dark kitchen where a toddler sat splay-leggedon the floor enjoying his tears, and an infant in a perambulator sobbed inelemental fury. Beyond, in the bright sunshine of the garden, a boy ofthree or so was throwing stones from the pebble path against the woodendoor of an outhouse, an unproductive occupation which nevertheless made asatisfying noise.

'Stop that, Freddy,' she said automatically, and Freddy as automaticallywent on throwing the stones against the door.

The back garden was a long thin strip of ground that ran along the side ofthe back lane, and at the very end of it, a long way from the house, was awooden shed. Mrs Weekley pointed it out and said:

'Perhaps you would just go and introduce yourself, would you? The childrenwill be coming in from school for their midday meal and it isn't ready.'

'Children?' Grant said.

'Yes, the three eldest. So if you don't mind.'

'No, of course I don't mind,' Grant said. Indeed, few things would pleasehim like interrupting the great Silas Weekley this morning, but herefrained from saying so to Silas Weekley's wife.

He knocked twice on the door of the wooden hut—a very trim woodenhut—without getting an answer, and so opened the door.

Silas Weekley swung round from the table at which he was writing and said:'How dare you walk into my——' and then stopped as he saw Grant. He hadquite obviously expected the intruder to be his wife.

'Who are you?' he said rudely. 'If you are a journalist you will find thatrudeness doesn't pay. This is private ground and you are trespassing.'

'I am Detective-Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard,' Grant said andwatched the news sink home.

After a moment or two Silas got his lower jaw under control again andsaid: 'And what do you want, may I ask?' It was an attempt at truculenceand it was not convincing.

Grant said his regulation piece about investigating the disappearance ofLeslie Searle and accounting for the movements of all those who knewSearle, and noted with the unoccupied half of his mind that the ink on thescript that Weekley was working on was not only dry but dark. It wasyesterday's ink. Weekley had done not a line this morning although it wasnow past noon.

At the mention of Searle Weekley began a diatribe against moneyeddilettantes which—in view of Weekley's income and the sum total of hismorning's work—Grant thought inappropriate. He cut him short and askedwhat he had been doing on Wednesday night.

'And if I do not choose to tell you?'

'I record your refusal and go away.'

Weekley did not like the sound of this, so he muttered something aboutbeing badgered by the police.

'All that I am doing,' Grant pointed out, 'is asking for your co-operationas a citizen. As I have pointed out, it is within your right to refuseco-operation.'

Silas said sulkily that he had been writing on Wednesday night fromsupper-time onwards.

'Any witnesses to that?' Grant asked, wasting no frills on Silas.

'My wife, of course.'

'She was here with you?'

'No, of course not. She was in the house.'

'And you were here alone?'

'I was.'

'Thank you and good-morning,' Grant said walking out of the hut andshutting the door crisply behind him.

The morning smelt very fresh and sweet. The sour smell of vomited milk andrough-dried dish-cloths that had hung about the house was nothing to thesmell of soured humanity that filled the place where Silas Weekley worked.As he walked back to the house he remembered that it was from this joylessand distorted mind that the current English 'masterpieces' came. Thethought did nothing to reassure him. He avoided the joyless house, wherethe agitated clattering of pans (an appropriate orchestration, he couldn'thelp thinking) conveyed the preoccupation of its mistress, and walkedround the side of it to the front gate, accompanied by Freddy.

'Hullo, Freddy,' he said, sorry for the bored brat.

'Hullo,' Freddy said without enthusiasm.

'Isn't there a more exciting game than flinging stones at a door?'

'No,' said Freddy.

'Couldn't you find one if you looked about you?'

'No,' said Freddy, with cold finality.

Grant stood for a moment contemplating him.

'There will never be any doubt about your paternity, Frederick,' hesaid, and walked away up the lane to the spot where he had left his car.

It was down this lane that Leslie Searle had walked on Wednesday night,calling farewells to the group in the village street. He had walked pastthe Weekley cottage to where a stile led into the first of the fields thatlay between the village and the river bend.

At least that is what one took for granted that he did.

He could have walked along the back lane and come to the village streetagain. But there would have been little point, surely, in that. He wasnever seen again in the village. He had walked into the darkness of thelane and disappeared.

A little crazy, Tullis had said of Silas Weekley. But Silas Weekley didn'tstrike Grant as being crazy. A sadist, perhaps. A megalomaniac almostcertainly. A man sick of a twisted vanity. But actually crazy no.

Or would an alienist think differently?

One of the most famous alienists in the country had once said to him thatto write a book was to give oneself away. (Someone else had said the samething more wittily and more succinctly, but he could not think at themoment who it was.) There was unconscious betrayal in every line, said thealienist. What, wondered Grant, would the alienist's verdict be afterreading one of Silas Weekley's malignant effusions? That it was theoutpouring of a petty mind, a mere fermentation of vanity? Or that it wasa confession of madness?

He thought for a moment of going back to the Swan and ringing up Wickhampolice station from there, but the Swan would be busy just now and thetelephone a far from confidential affair. He decided to go back to Wickhamand have lunch there, so that he could see Inspector Rodgers at hisleisure and pick up any messages that might be waiting for him fromHeadquarters.

In Wickham he found the higher orders at the police station preparing toretire into the peace of the weekend, and the lower ranks preparing forthe weekly liveliness of Saturday night. Rodgers had little to say—he wasnever a talkative man—and nothing to report. The disappearance of Searlewas the talk of Wickham, he said, now that the morning papers had made itgeneral news; but no one had come in to suggest that they had seen him.

'Not even a "nut" to confess to the murder,' he said dryly.

'Well, that is a nice change,' Grant said.

'He'll be along, he'll be along,' Rodgers said resignedly, and invitedGrant home to lunch.

But Grant preferred to eat at the White Hart.

He was sitting in the dining-room of the White Hart eating theunpretentious but ample lunch that they provided, when the radio music inthe kitchen ceased, and presently, oddly urbane among the castanet racket,came the voice of the announcer.

'Before the news, here is a police message. Would anyone who gave a liftto a young man on Wednesday night on the road between Wickham and Crome,in Orfordshire, or anywhere in that vicinity, please communicate withScotland Yard——'

'Telephone Whitehall One Two One Two,' chanted the kitchen staff happily.

And then there was a rush of high-pitched conversation as the staff fellto on this latest tit-bit of news.

Grant ate the very good roly-poly without relish and went out again intothe sunlight. The streets, which had been teeming with Saturday shopperswhen he came in to lunch, were deserted, the shops shut. He drove out oftown wishing once more that he was going fishing. How had he ever chosen aprofession where he could not count on a Saturday afternoon holiday? Halfthe world was free to sit back and enjoy itself this sunny afternoon, buthe had to spend it pottering about asking questions that led nowhere.

He drove back to Salcott in a state of mental dyspepsia, being onlyslightly cheered by Dora Siggins. He picked up Dora in the long straightof dull hedged lane that ran for a mile or more parallel to the river justoutside the town. In the distance he had taken the plodding figure to be ayouth carrying a kit of tools, but as he came nearer and slowed in answerto the raised thumb, he found that it was a girl in dungarees carrying ashopping bag. She grinned cheekily at him and said:

'Saved my life, you have! I missed the bus because I was buying slippersfor the dance tonight.'

'Oh,' said Grant, looking at the parcel that had evidently refused to gointo the overflowing bag. 'Glass ones?'

'Not me,' she said, banging the door shut behind her and wrigglingcomfortably into the seat. 'None of that home-by-midnight stuff about me.'Sides, it wasn't a glass slipper at all, you know. It was fur. French, orsomething. We learned that at school.'

Grant wondered privately if modern youth had been left any illusions atall. What would a world without fantasy be like? Or did the charmingillusion that he was all-important fill for the modern child the place ofearlier and more impersonal fantasies? The thought improved his temperconsiderably.

At least they were quick of wit, these modern children. The cinema, hesupposed. It was always the one-and-tuppennys—the regulars—who got thepoint while the front balcony were still groping. His passenger had gothis reference to dance slippers without a second for consideration.

She was a gay child, even after a week's work and missing the bus on aSaturday half-holiday, and poured out her history without anyencouragement. Her name was Dora Siggins and she worked at a laundry, butshe had a boy friend in a garage at Salcott, and they were going to getmarried as soon as the boy friend got a rise, which would be at Christmas,if all went as they expected.

When, long afterwards, Grant sent Dora Siggins a box of chocolates as ananonymous tribute to the help she had been to him, he hoped heartily thatit would lead to no misunderstanding with the boy friend who was so sureof his rise at Christmas.

'You a commercial?' she asked presently, having exhausted her personalstory.

'No,' said Grant. 'I'm a policeman.'

'Go on!' she said, and then, struck by the possibility that he might betelling the truth, took a more careful look at the interior of the car.'Coo!' she said at length. 'Blamed if you aren't, at that!'

'What convinced you?' Grant said curiously.

'Spit and polish,' she said. 'Only the fire service and the police havethe spare time to keep a car shiny this way. I thought the police wereforbidden to give lifts?'

'You're thinking of the Post Office, aren't you. Here is Salcott on thehorizon. Where do you live?'

'The cottage with the wild cherry tree. My, I can't tell you how glad I amI didn't have to walk those four miles. You got the car out on the fly?'

'No,' Grant said, and asked why she should think that.

'Oh, the plain clothes and all. Thought maybe you were out for the day onyour little own. There's one thing you ought to have that the Americanpolice have.'

'What is that?' Grant asked bringing the car to a halt opposite thecottage with the cherry tree.

'Sirens to go yelling along the roads with.'

'God forbid,' Grant said.

'I've always wanted to go tearing along the streets behind a siren, seeingpeople scattering every way.'

'Don't forget your shoes,' Grant said, unsympathetically, indicating theparcel she was leaving on the seat.

'Oh, gee, no; thanks! Thanks a million for everything. I'll never say aword against the police as long as I live.'

She ran up the cottage path, paused to wave to him, and disappeared.

Grant moved on into the village to resume his questioning.

13

When Grant walked into the Mill House at a quarter to seven he felt thathe had riddled Salcott St Mary through a small-meshed sieve, and what hehad left in the sieve was exactly nothing. He had had a very finecross-section of life in England, and he was by that much the richer. Buttowards solving the problem that had been entrusted to him he had advancednot one foot.

Marta greeted him with her best contralto coo and drew him in to peace andrefreshment. The living-room of the Mill House stood over the water, andin the daytime its furnishings swam in the wavering light; a greensub-aqueous light. But this evening Marta had drawn the curtains over thelast of the sunset, and shut out the river light; she had prepared arefuge of warmth and reassurance, and Grant, tired and perplexed, wasgrateful to her.

'I am so glad that it is not Walter who has disappeared,' she said,wafting him to a chair with one of her favourite gestures and beginning topour sherry.

'Glad?' Grant said, remembering Marta's expressed opinion of Walter.

'If it was Walter who had disappeared, I should be a suspect, instead of asleeping partner.'

Grant thought that Marta as sleeping partner must have much in common withsleeping dogs.

'As it is I can sit at the side of the law and see the wheels go round.Are you being brilliant, my dear?'

'I'm flummoxed,' Grant said brutally, but Marta took it in her stride.

'You feel that way only because you are tired and hungry; and probablysuffering from dyspepsia, anyhow, after having to eat at the White Hartfor two days. I'm going to leave you with the sherry decanter and go downand get the wine. Cellar-cooled Moselle. The kitchen is under this room,and the cellar is under the kitchen, and the wine comes up as cold asrunning water. Oh dear, I promised myself I wasn't going to think ofrunning water any more today. I drew the curtains to shut out the river;I'm not so stuck on the river as I used to be. Perhaps we'll both feelbetter after the Moselle. When I've brought the wine up from the cellarI'm going to cook you an omelet as only I can cook one, and then we'llsettle down. So relax for a little and get back your appetite. If thesherry isn't dry enough for you there's some Tio Pepe in the cupboard; butme, I think it is overrated stuff.'

She went away, and Grant blessed her that she had not plagued him with thequestions that must have been crowding her mind. She was a woman who notonly appreciated good food and good drink but was possessed of that innategood sense that is half-way to kindness. He had never seen her to betteradvantage than in this unexpected country home of hers.

He lay back in the lamplight, his feet to the whickering logs, andrelaxed. It was warm and very quiet. There was no river song: the Rushmerewas a silent stream. No sound at all except the small noises of the fire.On the couch opposite him lay a newspaper, and behind it stood abook-case, but he was too tired to fetch either paper or book. At hiselbow was a shelf of reference books. Idly he read the titles till he cameto the London telephone book. The sight of those familiar volumes sent hismind flying down a new channel. They had said this evening, when he talkedto the Yard, that so far Searle's cousin had not bothered to get in touchwith them. They were not surprised by that, of course; the news had brokenonly that morning, and the artist cousin might live anywhere from theScilly Isles to a farm in Cumberland; she might never read newspapersanyway; she might, if it came to that, be entirely indifferent to any fatethat might overtake her cousin. After all, Searle had said quite franklythat they did not care for each other.

But Grant still wanted to talk to someone who knew Searle's background; orat least a little of that background. Now, relaxed and at leisure for thefirst time in two days, he put out his hand for the S volume, and, on thechance that she lived in London and that she and Searle were the childrenof two brothers, turned up the Searles. There was a Miss Searle who livedin Holly Pavement, he noticed. Holly Pavement was in Hampstead and was awell-known artist's colony. On an impulse he picked up the telephone andasked for the London number.

'One hour's delay. Call you back,' said the triumphant voice at the otherend.

'Priority,' Grant said. And gave his credentials.

'Oh,' said the voice, disappointed but game. 'Oh, well, I'll see what Ican do.'

'On the contrary,' Grant said, 'I'll see what you can do,' and hung up.

He put the telephone book back in its place, and pulled out Who's Who inthe Theatre to amuse himself with while he waited. Some of it made himfeel very old. Actors and actresses he had never heard of already had longlists of successes to their credit. The ones he knew had pages ofachievement stretching back into the already-quaint past. He began to lookup the people he knew, as one does in the index of an autobiography. TobyTullis, son of Sydney Tullis and his wife Martha (Speke). It wassurprising to think that a national institution like Toby Tullis had everbeen subjected to the processes of conception and brought into this worldby the normal method. He observed that Toby's early days as an actor weredecently shrouded under: 'Was at one time an actor.' His one-timecolleagues, Grant knew, would deny with heat that he had ever been evenapproximately an actor. On the other hand, Grant thought, remembering thismorning, his whole life was an 'act'. He had created a part for himselfand had played it ever since.

It was surprising, too, to find that Marguerite Merriam (daughter ofGeoffrey Merriam and his wife Brenda (Mattson)) had been considerablyolder than her adolescent fragility had led one to believe. Perhaps if shehad lived that adolescent quality would have worn thin, and her power tobreak the public heart would have declined. That was, no doubt, what Martahad meant when she said that if she had lived another ten years herobituaries would have been back-page stuff.

Marta (daughter of Gervase Wing-Strutt, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. and his wifeAnne (Hallard)) was, of course, entirely orthodox. She had been educated atthe best schools and had sneaked her way on to the stage by the back-door ofelocution like so many of her well-bred predecessors. Grant hoped that whenin the next edition—or at most the next after—the letters D.B.E. followedMarta's name, it would comfort Gervase Wing-Strutt and his wife Anne for beingfooled by their daughter a quarter of a century ago.

He had not even taken the cream off the possible entertainment provided bythis enchanting volume when the telephone rang.

'Your call to London is through. Will you go ahead, please,' the voicesaid.

'Hullo,' Grant said. 'Could I speak to Miss Searle?'

'Miss Searle speaking,' said a pleasant voice, a shade on the efficientside.

'Miss Searle, I'm truly sorry to bother you, but have you, by any chance,a cousin called Leslie Searle?'

'I have, and if he has borrowed money from you you are wasting your timeif you think that I will pay it back.'

'Oh, no. It is nothing like that. Your cousin has disappeared whilestaying with friends in the country and we hoped that you might help us totrace him. My name is Grant. I'm a Detective-Inspector at Scotland Yard.'

'Oh,' said the voice, considering but not apparently dismayed. 'Well, Idon't see what help I can be to you. Leslie and I never had much to dowith each other. He wasn't my cup of tea, and I certainly am not his.'

'It would be some help if I could come and talk to you about him. Wouldyou, perhaps, be at home tomorrow afternoon if I called?'

'Well, tomorrow afternoon I was going to a concert at the Albert Hall.'

'Oh. Then I might manage it just before lunch if that is any better foryou.'

'You are very accommodating for a policeman,' she remarked.

'Criminals don't find us that way,' he said.

'I thought providing accommodation for criminals was the end and object ofScotland Yard. It's all right, Inspector. I won't go to the concert. It isnot a very good one anyhow.'

'You'll be in if I call?'

'Yes, I'll be here.'

'That is very kind of you.'

'That over-rated photographer didn't take the family jewels with him whenhe left, did he?'

'No. Oh, no. He has just disappeared.'

She gave a small snort. It was apparent that whatever Miss Searle had totell him about her cousin there would be no suppression of facts or falsemodesty in her story.

As Grant hung up, Marta came back preceded by a small boy carrying woodfor the fire. The boy put the logs neatly in the hearth, and then eyedGrant with respectful awe.

'Tommy has something he wants to ask you,' Marta said. 'He knows that youare a detective.'

'What is it, Tommy?'

'Will you show me your revolver, sir?'

'I would if I had it with me. But it's in a drawer in Scotland Yard, I'mafraid.'

Tommy looked cut to the heart. 'I thought you always carried one. TheAmerican cops do. You can shoot, can't you, sir?'

'Oh, yes,' Grant said relieving the awful fear that was clearly dawning.'I'll tell you what, next time you come to London, you can come toScotland Yard and I'll show you the revolver.'

'I can come to the Yard? Oh, thank you. Thank you very much, sir. Thatwould be just bonza.'

He went, with a polite goodnight, in an aura of radiance a foot thick.

'And parents think they can cure boys of liking lethal weapons by notgiving them toy soldiers,' Marta said, as she set the omelet out on thetable. 'Come and eat.'

'I owe you for a trunk call to London.'

'I thought that you were going to relax.'

'I was but I got an idea, and it has taken me the first step forward inthis case since I took it over.'

'Good!' she said. 'Now you can feel happy and let your digestive juices dotheir work.'

A small round table had been set near the fire, with candles for pleasureand decoration, and they ate together in a friendly quiet. Mrs Thrupp cameup with the chicken, and was introduced, and was volubly grateful forGrant's invitation to Tommy. After that peace was uninterrupted. Overcoffee the talk went to Silas Weekley and the oddness of the ménage in thelane.

'Silas prides himself on living "working-class", whatever that may mean.None of his children is going to begin any better off than he did. He's afrightful bore about his elementary school origins. You would think he wasthe first elementary schoolboy to go to Oxford since the place wasfounded. He's the classic case of inverted snobbery.'

'But what does he do with all the money he makes?'

'God knows. Buries it under the floor of that little hut where he works,perhaps. No one is ever allowed to go inside that hut.'

'I interviewed him in that hut this morning.'

'Alan! How clever of you! What was inside?'

'One well-known writer, doing very little work.'

'I expect he sweats blood over his writing. He has no imagination, youknow. I mean, he has no idea how another person's mind works. So hissituations, and his characters' reaction to the situations, are allclichés. He sells because of his "earthiness", his "elemental strength",God save us all. Let us push back the table and get nearer the fire.'

She opened a cupboard, and said in an excellent imitation of the boys whoused to sell things off trays on railway platforms: 'Drambuie,Benedictine, Strega, Grand Marnier, Bols, Chartreuse, Slivovitz, Armagnac,Cognac, Rakia, Kümmel, Various French Sirops of Unspeakable Sweetness, andMrs Thrupp's Ginger Cordial!'

'Is it your intention to seduce official secrets from the CriminalInvestigation Department?'

'No, darling; I am offering homage to your palate. You are one of the fewmen I know who possesses such a thing.'

She put the Chartreuse and the liqueur glasses on a tray and arranged herlong legs in comfort on the couch.

'Now tell me,' she said.

'But I have nothing to tell,' he protested.

'I don't mean that kind of tell. I mean talk at me. Pretend I'm yourwife—which God forbid—and just make an audience of me. For instance, youdon't really think that that poor stick Walter Whitmore ever got up enoughred blood to tap the Searle boy on the head, do you?'

'No, I don't think so. Sergeant Williams calls Walter a pushee, and Ithink I agree with him.'

'Calls him a what?'

Grant explained, and Marta said: 'And how right your Sergeant Williams is!Walter's taking-off is long overdue.'

'He may do his own taking-off if this affair isn't cleared up.'

'Yes, I suppose he is having a bad time, poor silly creature. The gossipin a small country place is deadly. Have you had any answer to your policeappeal, by the way? I heard it at one o'clock.'

'No, not up to six-forty-five, when I last talked to the Yard. I gave themthis number for the next two hours. I hope you don't mind.'

'Why do you think he might have been given a lift?'

'Because if he isn't in the river he must have walked away from it.'

'Of his own accord? But that would be a very odd thing to do.'

'He may be suffering from amnesia. There are five possibilitiesaltogether.'

'Five!'

'On Wednesday night Searle walked away down that lane, healthy and sober;and he has not been near since. The possibilities are: one, that he fellinto the water accidentally and was drowned; two, that he was murdered andthrown in the river; three, that he walked away for reasons of his own;four, that he wandered away because he forgot who he was and where he wasgoing; five, that he was kidnapped.'

'Kidnapped!'

'We don't know anything about his American life; we have to makeallowances for that. He may even have come to this country to get awayfrom the States for a little. I shan't know about that until we have areport about him from the Coast—if then! Tell me, what did you think ofSearle?'

'In what way?'

'Well, would you say he was a practical joker, for instance?'

'Anything but.'

'Yes. Liz Garrowby was against that too. She said he wouldn't think apractical joke funny. How impressed do you think he was with Liz Garrowby?You were there to dinner.'

'Impressed enough to make Walter sick with jealousy.'

'Really?'

'They were nice together, Leslie and Liz. They were a natural pair,somehow. Something that Walter and Liz will never be. I don't think Walterknows anything about Liz; and I had an idea that Leslie Searle knew quitea lot.'

'Did you like him when you met him? You took him back with you that night,after dinner.'

'Yes. Yes to both. I liked him with reservations.'

'What kind of reservations?'

'It's difficult to describe. I could hardly take my eyes off him, and yethe never struck me as being—real. That sounds mad, doesn't it.'

'You mean there was something phony about him?'

'Not in the accepted sense. He was obviously what he said he was. In anycase, our Miss Easton-Dixon bears witness to that, as you probably know.'

'Yes, I was talking to Miss Easton-Dixon this afternoon about him. Herphotograph of him may prove very useful. What did you and Searle talkabout, the night you brought him back with you?'

'Oh, cabbages and kings. People he had photographed. People we had bothmet. People he wanted to meet. We spent a long time in mutual adoring ofDanny Minsky, and another long time in furious disagreement aboutMarguerite Merriam. Like everyone else he thought Marguerite the world'sgenius, and wouldn't hear a word against her. I got so annoyed with himthat I told him a few home-truths about Marguerite. I was ashamed ofmyself afterwards. It's a mean thing to break children's toys.'

'I expect it did him good. He was too old to have the facts of life keptfrom him.'

'I hear you've been collecting alibis today.'

'How did you hear?'

'The way I hear everything. From Mrs Thrupp. Who are the unlucky peoplewho have none?'

'Practically the whole village, including Miss Easton-Dixon.'

'Our Dixie is "out". Who else?'

'Miss Lavinia Fitch.'

'Dear Lavinia!' Marta said, laughing outright at the thought of MissFitch on murder bent.

'Liz Garrowby?'

'Poor Liz must be having a thin time over this. I think she was half inlove with the boy.'

'Mrs Garrowby?'

Marta paused to consider this. 'Do you know, I wouldn't put it past thewoman. She would do it and not turn a hair because she would persuadeherself that it was the right thing to do. She'd even go to churchafterwards and ask God's blessing on it.'

'Toby Tullis?'

'N-o, I hardly think so. Toby would find some other way of getting even.Something much less risky for Toby and just as satisfying. Toby is fertilein inventing small revenges. I don't think he would need to murderanyone.'

'Silas Weekley?'

'I wonder. I wonder. Yes, I think Silas would commit murder. Especially ifthe book he happened to be writing at the moment was not going well. Thebooks are Silas's outlet for his hatred, you see. If that was dammed up hemight kill someone. Someone who seemed to him rich and well-favoured andundeservedly fortunate.'

'You think Weekley mad?'

'Oh, yes. Not certifiable perhaps, but definitely unbalanced. Is there anytruth, by the way, in the rumour of a quarrel between Walter and theSearle boy?'

'Whitmore denies that it was a quarrel. He says it was "just a spat".'

'So there was bad feeling between them?'

'I don't know if we have even evidence for that. A temporary annoyance ishardly the same thing as bad feeling. Men can disagree quite fundamentallyin a pub of an evening without any fundamental bad feeling on eitherside.'

'Oh, you are maddening. Of course there was bad feeling, and of course weknow why. It was about Liz.'

'Having no connections in the Fourth Dimension, I couldn't say,' Grantsaid, mocking her jumped-to conclusion. 'Whitmore said Searle was"provocative". What, can you tell me from your point of vantage, would hebe provocative about?'

'He probably told Walter how little he appreciated Liz, and that if Walterdidn't mend his ways he would take Liz from him, and if Walter thought hewasn't up to it he was wrong and he would get Liz to pack and walk awaywith him by a week next Tuesday, and there was five pounds that said hewas right. And Walter said, very huffy and stiff, that in this country wedid not bet on the possible bestowal of women's favours, at leastgentlemen didn't, and to put five pounds on Liz was simply insulting(Walter has no sense of the ridiculous at all, you know; that is how heperpetrates those broadcasts and endears himself to old ladies who avoidthe country like the plague and wouldn't know a wren if they saw one); andLeslie probably said that if he thought a fiver too little he was willingto make it ten, since if Liz had been engaged to a prig like Walter fornearly twelve months she was just ripe for a change and the ten would bejust found money, and so then Walter got up and went out and banged thedoor behind him.'

'How did you know about the banged door?'

'My dear soul, everyone in Orfordshire knows about the banged door by thistime. That is why Walter is suspect Number One. Is that all your list ofLacking Alibis, by the way?'

'No, there is Serge Ratoff.'

'Oh. What was Serge doing?'

'Dancing on the greensward by the river in the dark.'

'That has the ring of truth, anyhow.'

'Why? Have you seen him?'

'No. But it is just the kind of thing Serge would do. He is still full ofthe idea of a come-back, you know. Before the scene about Leslie Searle,he was planning the come-back as a way of pleasing Toby; now he isplanning it just to "show" Toby.'

'Where do you get all this inside knowledge?'

'I haven't played parts for twenty-five years on just the producer'sdirections,' she said.

He looked across at her, elegant and handsome in the firelight, andthought of all the different parts that he had seen her play: courtesansand frustrated hags, careerists and domestic doormats. It was true thatactors had a perception, an understanding of human motive, that normalpeople lacked. It had nothing to do with intelligence, and very little todo with education. In general knowledge Marta was as deficient as a notvery bright child of eleven; her attention automatically slid off anythingthat was alien to her own immediate interests and the result was an almostinfantine ignorance. He had seen the same thing in hospital nurses, andsometimes in overworked G.P.s. But put a script in her hands, and from asecret and native store of knowledge she drew the wherewithal to build hercharacterisation of the author's creation.

'Supposing that this really is a case of homicide,' he said. 'Judgingentirely on looks and recent form, so to speak, who would you put yourmoney on?'

She considered this for a little, turning her empty liqueur glass in thefirelight.

'Emma Garrowby, I think,' she said at last. 'Could Emma have done it?Physically speaking, I mean.'

'Yes. She left Miss Easton-Dixon where their ways parted on Wednesdaynight, and after that time was her own. No one knows what time she cameback to Trimmings. The others had gone to bed; or rather, to their rooms.It is Mrs Garrowby who locks up the front of the house, anyhow.'

'Yes. Ample time. It isn't so very far from Trimmings to that bend in theriver. I do wonder what Emma's shoes were like on Thursday morning. Or didshe clean them herself.'

'Believe me, if there was any unwonted mud on the shoes she cleaned themherself. Mrs Garrowby looks to me a very methodical person. Why do youpick on Emma Garrowby?'

'Well, I take it you commit murder because you are one-idead. Or havebecome one-idead. As long as you have a variety of interests you can'tcare about any one of them to the point of murder. It is when you have allyour eggs in the same basket, or only one egg left in the basket, that youlose your sense of proportion. Do I make myself clear, Inspector Grant?'

'Perfectly.'

'Good. Have some more Chartreuse. Well, Emma seems to me the mostconcentrated of the possible suspects. No one could call Sergeconcentrated, except on the thing of the moment. Serge spends his lifehaving flaring rows, and has never shown signs of killing anyone. Thefarthest he ever gets is to fling whatever happens to come handiest.'

'Lacking a whip,' Grant said; and told her of his interview with Serge.'And Weekley?'

'On form, to use your own excellent metaphor, Silas is only a pound or twobehind Emma; but quite definitely behind. Silas has his own success, hisfamily, the books he is going to write in the future (even if they arejust the same old ones over again in different words); Silas's interestisn't channelled the way Emma's is. Short of having a brain-storm, someunreasoning hatred, Silas would have no urge to get rid of Leslie. Norwould Toby. Toby's life simply corruscates with variety. Toby would neverthink of killing anyone. As I told you, he has too many other ways ofmaking the score even. But Emma. Emma has nothing but Liz.'

She thought it over for a moment, and Grant let the silence lieuninterrupted.

'You should have seen Emma when Walter and Liz announced theirengagement,' she said at last. 'She—she positively glittered. She was awalking Christmas tree. It was what she had always wanted, and against allprobability it had happened. Walter, who met all the clever and beautifulwomen of this generation, had fallen in love with Liz and they were goingto be married. Walter would get Trimmings one day, and Lavinia's fortune,so even if his vogue went they would have as much of this world's goods asanyone could possibly want or use. It was a fairy-tale come true. She wasfloating just an inch or two off the ground. Then Leslie Searle came.'Marta, the actress, let the silence come back. And being also an artistshe left it unbroken.

The logs slipped and spluttered, sending up fresh jets of flame, and Grantlay still in his chair and thought about Emma Garrowby.

And about the two things that Marta did not know.

It was odd that Marta's chosen suspect should occupy the same area as thetwo unaccountables in this case: the glove in Searle's drawer, and thespace in the photographic box.

Emma. Emma Garrowby. The woman who had brought up a younger sister andwhen that sister moved out from under her wing married a widower with ayoung child. She channelled her interest as naturally as Toby Tullisspread his wide, didn't she? She had been radiant—'a walking Christmastree'—over the engagement; and in the period since that engagement (itwas five months, he happened to know, not twelve) her initial delight musthave spread and amplified to something much more formidable; anacceptance; a sense of achievement, of security. The engagement had stoodwhatever small shocks it had encountered in these five months, and Emmamust have got used to thinking of it as safe and immutable.

And then, as Marta said, Leslie Searle.

Searle with his charm and his fly-by-night life. Searle with his air ofbeing not quite of this world. No one could view this modern shower ofgold with more instant distrust than Emma Garrowby.

'What would fit into a space 10-1/2 inches, by 3-1/2 by 4?' he asked.

'A hair brush,' said Marta.

There was a game played by psychologists, Grant remembered, where thevictim said the first thing that occurred to him on hearing a given word.It must work out pretty well, all things considered. He had put this sameproposition to Bill Maddox, and Maddox, as unhesitatingly as Marta hadsaid 'A hairbrush', had said 'A spanner'. He remembered that Williams hadproffered a bar of soap.

'Anything else?'

'A set of dominoes. A box of envelopes? No, a shade on the small side.Packs of cards? Enough cards to set up on a desert island! Table cutlery.The family spoons. Someone been secreting the family silver?'

'No. It is just something I wondered about.'

'If it's the Trimmings silver, just let it go, my dear. It wouldn't fetchthirty shillings the lot at an auction sale.' Her eye went in unconscioussatisfaction to the Georgian simplicity of her own implements on the tablebehind her. 'Tell me, Alan, it wouldn't be indiscreet or unprofessional,would it, to tell me who is your own favourite for the part?'

'The part?'

'The killer.'

'It would be both unprofessional and indiscreet. But I don't think thereis any wild indiscretion in telling you that I don't think there is one.'

'What! You really think Leslie Searle is still alive? Why?'

Why indeed, he asked himself. What was there in the set-up that gave himthis feeling of being at a performance? Of being pushed into the stalls sothat an orchestra pit intervened between him and reality. The AssistantCommissioner had once said to him in an unwonted moment of expansivenessthat he had the most priceless of all attributes for his job: flair. 'Butdon't let it ride you, Grant,' he had said. 'Keep your eye on theevidence.' Was this a sample of letting his flair ride him? The chanceswere ninety-nine to one that Searle had fallen into the river. All theevidence pointed that way. If it hadn't been for the complication of thequarrel with Whitmore, he, Grant, would not have entered into the affairat all; it would have been a simple case of 'missing believed drowned'.

And yet. And yet. Now you see it, now you don't. That old conjurer'sphrase. It haunted him.

Half consciously he said it aloud.

Marta stared and said: 'A conjuring trick? By whom? For what?'

'I don't know. I just have a strong feeling that I'm being taken for aride!'

'You think that Leslie just walked away somehow?'

'Or someone planned it to look like that. Or something. I have a strongfeeling of watching something being sawn in half.'

'You're overworking,' Marta said. 'Where do you think Leslie could havedisappeared to? Unless he just came back to the village and lay doggosomewhere.'

Grant came wide awake and regarded her with admiration. 'Oddly enough,' hesaid, amused, 'I had never thought of that. Do you think Toby is hidinghim to make things difficult for Walter?'

'No, I know it doesn't make sense. But neither does your idea about hiswalking away. Where would he walk to in the middle of the night in nothingbut flannels and a raincoat?'

'I shall know more about that when I have seen his cousin tomorrow.'

'He has a cousin? How surprising. It's like finding Mercury with anin-law. Who is he?'

'It's a woman. A painter, I understand. A delightful creature who hasgiven up an Albert Hall Sunday afternoon concert to be at home for me. Iused your telephone to make an assignation with her.'

'And you expect her to know why Leslie walked away in the middle of thenight in nothing but flannels and a raincoat?'

'I expect her to be able to suggest where Leslie might have been headedfor.'

'To borrow the callboy's immortal phrase: I hope it keeps fine for you,'Marta said.

14

Grant drove back to Wickham through the spring night,cheered in body and soul.

And Emma Garrowby sat beside him all the way.

Flair might whisper soft seductions to him, but Emma was there in themiddle of the picture, where Marta had set her, and she was much too solidto be conjured away. Emma made sense. Emma was example and precedent. Theclassic samples of ruthlessness were domestic. The Lizzie Bordons. Emma,if it came to that, was primordial. A female creature protecting itsyoung. It required immense ingenuity to find a reason why Leslie Searleshould have chosen to disappear. It needed no ingenuity at all to suggestwhy Emma Garrowby should have killed him.

In fact, it was a sort of perversity to keep harking back to the idea thatSearle might have ducked. He could just hear the A.C. if he ever camebefore him with a theory like that. Evidence, Grant, suggestive evidence.Common sense, Grant, common sense. Don't let your flair ride you, Grant,don't let your flair ride you. Disappear of his own accord? This happyyoung man who could pay his bills at the Westmorland, buy expensiveclothes to wear and expensive sweets to give away, travel the world atother people's expense? This young man of such surprising good-looks thatevery head he encountered was turned either literally or metaphorically?This charming young man who liked plain little Liz so much that he kept aglove of hers? This professionally successful young man who was engaged ina deal that would bring him both money and kudos?

Common sense, Grant. Evidence, Grant. Don't let your flair ride you.

Consider Emma Garrowby, Grant. She had the opportunity. She had themotive. And, on form, she probably had the will. She knew where the campwas that night.

But she didn't know that they had come in to Salcott for a drink.

He wasn't drowned in Salcott.

She couldn't have known that she would find him alone. It was sheer chancethat they separated that night.

Someone found him alone. Why not Emma?

How could it happen?

Perhaps she arranged it.

Emma! How?

Has it struck you that Searle engineered that exit of Walter's?

No. How?

It was Searle who was provocative. He provoked Walter to the point wherehe couldn't stand it a minute longer, and had either to go or stay andhave a row. Searle got rid of Walter that evening.

Why should he?

Because he had an appointment.

An appointment! With whom?

Liz Garrowby.

That is absurd. There is no evidence whatever that the Garrowby girl hadany serious interest in——

Oh, it was not Liz who sent Searle the message to meet her.

No? Who then?

Emma.

You mean that Searle went to meet someone he thought was Liz?

Yes. He behaved like a lover, if you think about it.

How?

Do you remember how he took farewell of his acquaintances that night? Thebanter about going to their beds on so fine a spring night? The gaiety?The on-top-of-the-worldness?

He had just had several beers.

So had his companions. Some of them a great deal more than several. Butwere they singing metaphorical songs to the spring night? They were not.They were taking the shortest cut home to bed, even the youngest of them.

Well, it's a theory.

It is more than that. It is a theory in accordance with the evidence.

Evidence, Grant, evidence.

Don't let your flair ride you, Grant.

All the way along the dark lanes between Salcott St Mary and Wickham, EmmaGarrowby sat beside him. And when he went to bed he took her with him.

Because he was tired, and had dined well, and had at last seen a path ofsome kind open in front of him, he slept well. And when his eyes opened indaylight on The Hour Cometh in purple wool cross-stitch, he regarded thetext as a promise rather than a warning. He looked forward to going totown, if only as a mental bath after his plunge into Salcott St Mary. Hecould then come back and see it in proportion. You couldn't get theflavour of anything properly unless you cleaned your palate between times.He had wondered often how married men managed to combine their domesticlives with the absorbing demands of police work. It occurred to him nowfor the first time that married life must be the perfect palate-cleanser.There could be nothing like a spell of helping young Bobby with hisalgebra to bring you back with a fresh mind to the problem of the currentcrime.

At least he would be able to get some clean shirts, he thought. He put histhings into his bag, and turned to go down to breakfast. It was Sunday andstill early, but they would manage to give him something. As he opened thedoor of his room the telephone rang.

The White Hart's only concession to progress was to install bedsidetelephones. He crossed the room to the instrument and picked it up.

'Inspector Grant?' said the voice of the landlord. 'Just a minute please;you're wanted on the phone.' There was a moment's silence, and then hesaid: 'Go ahead, please; you're through.'

'Hullo.'

'Alan?' said Marta's voice. 'Is that you, Alan?'

'Yes, it's me. You're awake early aren't you?'

'Listen, Alan. Something has happened. You must come out straight away.'

'Out? To Salcott, you mean?'

'To the Mill House. Something has happened. It's very important or Iwouldn't have called you so early.'

'But what has happened? Can't you——'

'You're on a hotel telephone, aren't you.'

'Yes.'

'I can't very well tell you, Alan. Something has turned up. Something thatalters everything. Or rather, everything you—you believed in, so tospeak.'

'Yes. All right. I'll come at once.'

'Have you had breakfast?'

'Not yet.'

'I'll have some ready for you.'

What a woman, he thought as he put back the receiver. He had alwaysthought that the first requisite in a wife was intelligence, and now hewas sure of it. There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in herlife for him; but it was a pity, all the same. A woman who could announcea surprising development in a homicide case without babbling on thetelephone was a prize, but one who could in the same breath ask if he hadhad breakfast and arrange to supply him with the one he had not had wasabove rubies.

He went to collect his car, full of speculation. What could Marta possiblyhave unearthed? Something that Searle had left the night he was there?Some piece of gossip that the milkman had brought?

One thing was certain: it was not a body. If it had been a body Marta,being Marta, would have conveyed as much, so that he could bring out withhim all the necessary paraphernalia and personnel to deal with such adiscovery.

It was a day of high wind and rainbows. The halcyon time of windlesssunlight that comes each year to the English spring when the first dustlies on the roads was over. Spring was all of a sudden wild and robust.Glittering showers slanted across the landscape. Great clouds soared upover the horizon and swept in shrieking squalls across the sky. The treescowered, and plumed themselves, and cowered again.

The countryside was deserted. Not because of the weather but because itwas Sunday. Some of the cottages, he observed, still had their blindsdrawn. People who got up at the crack of dawn during the week, and had noanimals to get them up on Sunday, must be glad to sleep late. He hadgrumbled often when his police duties had broken into his private life (aluxury grumble, since he could have retired years ago when his aunt lefthim her money), but to spend one's life in bondage to the predilections ofanimals must be a sad waste of a free man's time.

As he brought the car up to the landward side of the Mill House, where thedoor was, Marta came out to greet him. Marta never 'dressed the part' inthe country as so many of her colleagues did. She looked on the countryrather as the country people themselves did, as a place to be lived in;not something that one put on specially bright and casual clothes for. Ifher hands were cold she wore gloves. She did not feel that she must looklike a gypsy just because she happened to live in the Mill House atSalcott St Mary. She was therefore looking as chic and sophisticated thismorning as though she were receiving him on the steps of Stanworth. But hethought she had a shocked look. Indeed she looked as though she had quitelately been very sick.

'Alan! You can't imagine how glad I was to hear your voice on thetelephone. I was afraid that you might have gone to town, early as itwas.'

'What is this that has turned up so unexpectedly?' he asked making for thedoor. But she led him round and down to the kitchen door at the side ofthe house.

'It was your follower, Tommy Thrupp, that found it. Tommy is mad onfishing. And he quite often goes out before breakfast to fish, becauseapparently that is a good time.' The 'apparently' was typically Marta, hethought. Marta had lived by the river for years and still had to takesomeone else's word about the proper time for fishing. 'On Sundays heusually takes something in his pocket and doesn't come back—something toeat, I mean—but this morning he came back inside an hour because hehad—because he had caught something very odd.'

She opened the bright green door and led him into the kitchen. In thekitchen were Tommy Thrupp and his mother. Mrs Thrupp was huddled over thestove as if she also was feeling not too well, but Tommy came to meet themin sparkling form. There was nothing sickly about Tommy. Tommy wastransfigured. He was translated. He was six feet high and crowned withlightning.

'Look, sir! Look what I fished up!' he said, before Marta could sayanything, and drew Grant to the kitchen table. On the table, carefullyplaced on several thicknesses of newspaper so as to preserve the scrubbedperfection of the wood, was a man's shoe.

'I'll never be able to bake on that table again,' moaned Mrs Thrupp, notlooking round.

Grant glanced at the shoe and remembered the police description of themissing man's clothes.

'It's Searle's, I take it,' he said.

'Yes,' Marta said.

It was a brown shoe, and instead of being laced it was tied with a buckleand strap across the instep. It was water-logged and very muddy.

'Where did you fish it up, Tommy?'

'Bout a hundred yards down-stream from the big bend.'

'I suppose you didn't think of marking the place?'

'A course I marked it!' Tommy said, hurt.

'Good for you. Presently you'll have to show me the place. Meanwhile waithere, will you. Don't go out and talk about this.'

'No, sir, I won't. No one's in on this but me and the police.'

A little brightened by this version of the situation, Grant went upstairsto the telephone in the living-room and called Inspector Rodgers. Aftersome delay, since the station had to connect him to the Rodgers's home, hewas put through to him, and broke the news that the river would have to bedragged again and why.

'Oh, lord!' groaned Rodgers. 'Did the Thrupp boy say where he fished itup?'

'About a hundred yards down from the big bend, if that conveys anything toyou.'

'Yes. That's about two hundred yards down-stream from where they had theirbivouac. We did that stretch with a small-tooth comb. You don't think thatperhaps——? Does the shoe look as if it had been in the water sinceWednesday night?'

'It does indeed.'

'Oh, well. I'll make arrangements. It would happen on a Sunday, wouldn'tit?'

'Do it as quietly as you can, will you? We don't want more spectators thanwe can help.'

As he hung up Marta came in with a tray and began to put his breakfast onthe table.

'Mrs Thrupp is still what she calls "heaving", so I judged it better to doyour breakfast myself. How do you like your eggs? Sunny side up?'

'If you really want to know, I like them broken when they are half cookedand rummelled up with a fork.'

'Panaché!' Marta said, delighted. 'That is one I have not met before. Weare growing intimate, aren't we! I am probably the only woman alive exceptyour housekeeper who knows that you like your breakfast eggs streaky.Or—am I?'

'Well, there's a woman in a village near Amiens that I once confessed itto. But I doubt if she would remember.'

'She is probably making a fortune out of the idea. Eggs à l'Anglaiseprobably has a totally new meaning in France nowadays. Brown bread orwhite?'

'Brown, please. I'm going to have to owe you for another trunk call.' Hepicked up the telephone again and called Williams's home address inLondon. While he waited for the connection he called Trimmings and askedto speak to the housekeeper. When Mrs Brett a little breathless, arrivedon the wire he asked who was in the habit of cleaning the shoes atTrimmings and was told that it was the kitchen girl, Polly.

'Could you find out from Polly whether Mr Searle was in the habit oftaking off his brown buckled shoes without unbuckling them, or if healways unbuckled them first?'

Yes, Mrs Brett would do that, but wouldn't the Inspector like to speak toPolly himself?

'No, thank you. I'll confirm anything she says, later on, of course. But Ithink she is less likely to get flustered if you ask her a quite ordinaryquestion than if she was brought to the telephone to be questioned by astranger. I don't want her to be agitated into thinking about the questionat all. I want her first natural reaction to the question. Were the shoesbuckled or unbuckled when she cleaned them?'

Mrs Brett understood, and would the Inspector hang on?

'No. I'm expecting an important call. But I shall call you back in a veryshort time.'

Then London came on the wire, and Williams's not-too-pleased voice couldbe heard telling the Exchange: 'All right, all right, I've been ready anytime this last five minutes.'

'That you, Williams? This is Grant. Listen. I was coming up to town todayto interview Leslie Searle's cousin. Yes, I found out where she lived. Hername is Searle. Miss Searle. And she lives at 9 Holly Pavement, inHampstead. It's a sort of coagulation of artists. I talked to her lastnight on the telephone and I arranged to see her this afternoon aboutthree. Now I can't. A boy has just fished a shoe belonging to LeslieSearle out of the river. Yes, all right, crow! So we have to startdragging all over again, and I have to be here. Are you free to go and seeMiss Searle for me, or shall I get someone else from the Yard?'

'No, I'll go, sir. What do you want me to ask her?'

'Get everything she knows about Leslie Searle. When she saw him last. Whatfriends he had in England. Everything she can give you about him.'

'Very good. What time shall I call you back?'

'Well, you ought to be there at a quarter to three, and leaving an hourclear—four o'clock, perhaps.'

'At the Wickham station?'

'Well, no, perhaps not. In view of the slowness of dragging, perhaps youhad better call me at the Mill House at Salcott. It is Salcott 5.'

It was only when he had hung up that he realised that he had not askedWilliams how his mission to Benny Skoll had turned out.

Marta came in with his breakfast, and as she poured his coffee he talkedto Trimmings again.

Mrs Brett had talked to Polly, and Polly had no doubt about the matter atall. The straps on Mr Searle's brown shoes had always been undone when heput them out for cleaning. She knew because she used to rebuckle them soas to keep the straps from banging about when she cleaned them. Shebuckled them to keep the straps still and unbuckled them when she hadfinished.

So that was that.

He began to eat his breakfast, and Marta poured out a cup of coffee forherself and sat sipping it. She looked cold and pale, but he could notresist the question:

'Did you notice anything odd about the shoe?'

'Yes. It hadn't been unfastened.'

A marvellous woman. He supposed that she must have vices to counterbalanceso many excellences but he couldn't imagine what they could be.

15

It was very cold by the river. The willows shivered, and the water waspewter colour, its surface alternately wrinkled by the wind and pitted bythe passing showers. As the slow hours went by Rodgers's normally anxiousface slipped into a settled melancholy, and the tip of his nose peeringout from the turned-up collar of his waterproof was pink and sad. So farno intruders had come to share their vigil. The Mill House had been swornto secrecy and had not found the secrecy any strain; Mrs Thrupp hadretired to bed, still 'heaving'; and Tommy, as police ally, was part ofthe dragging party. The wide sweep of the river across the alluvial landwas far from road or path and devoid of dwellings, so there were nopassers-by to stop and stare, to pause for a little and then go on tospread the news.

They were in a world by themselves down there by the river. A timelessworld, and comfortless.

Grant and Rodgers had exhausted professional post-mortems long ago, andhad got no further. Now they were just two men alone in a meadow on achilly spring day. They sat together on the stump of a fallen willow,Grant watching the slow sweep of the questing drag, Rodgers looking outacross the wide flats of the valley floor.

'This is all flooded in winter,' he said. 'Looks quite lovely, too, if youcould forget the damage it's doing.'

'"Swift beauty come to pass
Has drowned the blades that strove",'

'What is that?'

'What an army friend of mine wrote about floods.

"Where once did wake and move
The slight and ardent grass.
Swift beauty come to pass
Has drowned the blades that strove."'

'Nice,' Rodgers said.

'Sadly old-fashioned,' Grant said. 'It sounds like poetry. A fataldefect, I understand.'

'Is it long?'

'Just two verses and the moral.'

'What is the moral?'

'"O Final Beauty, found
In many a drownèd place,
We love not less thy face
For lesser beauties drowned."'

Rodgers thought it over. 'That's good, that is,' he said. 'Your armyfriend knew what he was talking about. I was never one for reading poemsin books—I mean collections, but magazines sometimes put verses in tofill up the space when a story doesn't come to the bottom of the page. Youknow?'

'I know.'

'I read a lot of these, and every now and then one of them rings a bell. Iremember one of them to this day. It wasn't poetry properly speaking, Imean it didn't rhyme, but it got me where I lived. It said:

"My lot is cast in inland places,
Far from sounding beach
And crying gull,
And I
Who knew the sea's voice from my babyhood
Must listen to a river purling
Through green fields,
And small birds gossiping
Among the leaves."

'Now, you see, I was bred by the sea, over at Mere Harbour, and I've neverquite got used to being away from it. You feel hedged in, suffocated. ButI never found the words for it till I read that. I know exactly how thatbloke felt. "Small birds gossiping!"'

The scorn and exasperation in his voice amused Grant, but something amusedhim much more and he began to laugh.

'What's funny?' Rodgers asked, a shade defensively.

'I was just thinking how shocked the writers of slick detective storieswould be if they could witness two police inspectors sitting on a willowtree swapping poems.'

'Oh, them!' Rodgers said, in the tone that in lower circles is followed bya spit. 'Ever read any of these things?'

'Oh, yes. Now and then.'

'My sergeant makes a hobby of it. Collects the howlers. His record so faris ninety-two to a book. In a thing called Gods to the Rescue by somewoman or other.' He stopped to watch something and added: 'There's a womancoming now. Pushing a bike.'

Grant took a look and said: 'That's not a woman. It's a goddess to therescue.'

It was the unconquerable Marta, with vacuum flasks of hot coffee andsandwiches for all.

'The bicycle was the only way I could think of for carrying them,' sheexplained, 'but it is,

'How did you get through them, then?'

'I unloaded the bicycle, lifted the thing over, and loaded it again theother side.'

'The spirit that made the Empire.'

'That's as may be, but Tommy must come with me on the way back, and helpme.'

'Sure I will, Miss Hallard,' Tommy said, his mouth full of sandwich.

The men came up from the river and were presented to Marta. It amusedGrant to notice the cameraderie of those who quite patently had neverheard of her, and the awed good manners of those who had.

'I think the news has leaked out,' Marta said. 'Toby rang me up and askedif it was true that the river was being dragged again.'

'You didn't tell him why?'

'No. Oh, no,' she said, her face going a little bleak again at the memoryof the shoe.

By two o'clock in the afternoon they had a large attendance. And by threeo'clock the place was like a fair, with the local constable making valiantefforts to preserve some kind of decency.

At half-past three, when they had dragged the river almost as far asSalcott itself and had still turned up nothing. Grant went back to theMill House and found Walter Whitmore there.

'It was kind of you to send us the message, Inspector,' he said. 'I shouldhave come to the river, but somehow I couldn't.'

'There was not the slightest need for you to come.'

'Marta said that you were coming back here at teatime, so I waited here.Any—results?'

'Not so far.'

'Why did you want to know about the shoe, this morning?'

'Because it was fastened when found. I wanted to know if Searle normallypulled off those shoes without unbuckling them. Apparently he alwaysunbuckled them.'

'Then why—how could the shoe be fastened now?'

'Either it was sucked off by the current, or he kicked it off to makeswimming easier.'

'I see,' Walter said, drearily.

He refused tea, and went away looking more disorientated than ever.

'I do wish I could be as sorry for him as I should be,' Marta said. 'Chinaor Indian?'

Grant had had three large cups of scalding tea ('_So_ bad for yourinside!' Marta said) and was beginning to feel human again, when Williamsrang to report.

The report, in spite of Williams's best endeavours, was meagre. MissSearle didn't like her cousin and made no bones about it. She, too, was anAmerican, but they had been born at opposite sides of the United Statesand had never met until they were grown up. They had fought at sight,apparently. He sometimes rang her up when he came to England, but not thistime. She had not known that he was in England.

Williams had asked her if she was out a lot, and if she thought itpossible that Searle could have called, or telephoned, and not found her.She said that she had been in the Highlands, painting, and that Searlemight have called her many times without her knowledge. When she was awaythe studio was empty and there was no one to take telephone messages.

'Did you see the paintings?' Grant asked. 'The ones of Scotland.'

'Oh, yes. The place was full of them.'

'What were they like?'

'Very like Scotland.'

'Oh, orthodox.'

'I wouldn't know. The west of Sutherland and Skye, mostly.'

'And about his friends in this country?'

'She said she was surprised to hear that he had any friends anywhere.'

'She didn't suggest to you that Searle was a wrong 'un?'

'No, sir. Nothing like that.'

'And she couldn't suggest any reason why he should suddenly disappear, orwhere he could disappear to?'

'No, she couldn't. He has no people, she did tell me that. Parents dead,apparently; and he was an only child. But about his friends she seemed toknow nothing. What he said about having only a cousin in England was true,anyhow.'

'Well, thank you very much, Williams. I quite forgot to ask you thismorning if you found Benny?'

'Benny? Oh, yes. Quite easily.'

'And did he cry?'

Grant heard Williams laugh.

'No. He pulled a new one this time. He pretended to faint.'

'What did that get him?'

'It got him three free brandies and the sympathy of the multitude. We werein a pub, I need hardly say. After the second brandy he began to come toand moan about the way he was being persecuted, so they gave him a third.I was very unpopular.'

Grant considered this a fine sample of understatement.

'Luckily it was a West End pub,' Williams said. This, being translated,meant that there was no actual interference with his performance of hisduty.

'Did he agree to go with you for questioning?'

'He said he would go if I let him telephone first. I said he knew quitewell that he was free to telephone anyone at any hour of the day ornight—that was a Post Office arrangement—but if his call was innocent Isupposed he didn't mind my being the fly on the telephone-booth wall.'

'And did he agree?'

'He practically dragged me into the box. And who do you think that littlebastard was telephoning to?'

'His M.P.?'

'No. I think M.P.s are a bit shy of him nowadays. He overstayed hiswelcome last time. No, he rang up some bloke he knows who writes for theWatchman and told him the tale. Said he was no sooner "out" than somepoliceman or other was on his tail wanting him to go to Scotland Yard forquestioning, and how was a man to go straight if he was having an innocentdrink with his friends who didn't know anything about him, and an obviousplain-clothes tec came up and wanted to speak to him, and so on and go on.Then he came with me, quite pleased with himself.'

'Was he any help to the Yard?'

'No, but his girl was.'

'Did she blab?'

'No, she was wearing Poppy's earrings. Poppy Plumtre's.'

'No!'

'If we didn't happen to be taking Benny out of circulation for a little, Ithink his girl would put him out of it for good. She's raving mad. Hehasn't had her very long, and it seems she was thinking of leaving him, soBenny "bought" her a pair of diamond earrings. The amount of intelligenceBenny has wouldn't inconvenience a ladybird.'

'Did you get the rest of Poppy's stuff?'

'Yes. Benny coughed up. He hadn't had time to get to a fence with them.'

'Good work. What about the Watchman?'

'Well, I did want to let that Watchman bit of silliness stew in his ownjuice. But the Super wouldn't let me. Said it was no good having troublethat we could avoid even if we had the pleasure of seeing the Watchmanmaking a fool of itself. So I had to ring him up and tell him.'

'At least you must have got something back out of that.'

'Oh, yes. Yes. I don't deny I got some kick out of that. I said: "MrRitter, I'm Detective-Sergeant Williams. I was present when Benny Skollrang you up a few hours ago." "You were present?" he said. "But he waslodging a complaint against you!" "Oh, yes," I said. "It's a free countryyou know." "I don't call it so free for some," he said. "You were dragginghim away to be questioned at Scotland Yard." I said I invited him toaccompany me, and he didn't have to if he didn't want to.

'Then he gave me the old spiel about hounding criminals, and Benny Skollhaving paid his debt to Society, and that we had no right to hound him nowthat he was a free man again, and so forth. "You have shamed him beforehis friends," says Mr Ritter, "and pushed him back to hopelessness. Howmuch the better is Scotland Yard for having badgered poor little BennySkoll this afternoon?"

'"Two thousand pounds worth," I said.

'"What?" he said. "What are you talking about?"

'"That is the amount of jewellery he stole from Poppy Plumtre's flat onFriday night."

'"How do you know it was Benny?" he asked.

'I said Benny had handed over the loot in person, with the exception oftwo large single diamond earrings which were gracing the ears of hiscurrent lady friend. Then I said: "Goodnight, sir", very sweet and low,the way they do in the Children's Hour, and hung up. You know, I think hehad already written that letter about poor innocent Benny. He was sodashed. Writers must feel very flat when they've written something that noone can use.'

'Wait till Mr Ritter's flat is burgled,' Grant said. 'He'll come to usscreaming for the criminal's blood.'

'Yes, sir. Funny, isn't it? They're always the worst when it happens tothemselves. Any word from San Francisco?'

'Not yet, but it may come any minute. It doesn't seem so important now.'

'No. When I think of the whole notebook I filled interviewing busconductors in Wickham! No good for anything but the wastepaper basket.'

'Never throw notes away, Williams.'

'Keep them for seven years and find a use for them?'

'Keep them for your autobiography, if you like, but keep them. I wouldlike to have you back here, but at the moment the work doesn't warrant it.It is just a matter of standing about in the cold.'

'Well, I hope something turns up before sunset, sir.'

'I hope it does. Literally.'

Grant hung up and went back to the river-bank. The crowd had thinned alittle as people began to go home to their Sunday high-tea, but the solidcore who would happily starve in order to see a man's dead body draggedfrom the river were still there. Grant looked at their blue moronic facesand speculated for the thousandth time since he became a policeman aboutwhat made them tick. One thing was certain; if we revived publicexecutions tomorrow, the 'gate' would be of cup-tie proportions.

Rodgers had gone back to Wickham, but it seemed that the Press hadarrived; both the local man and the Crome correspondent of the Londondailies wanted to know why the river was being re-dragged. There was alsothe Oldest Inhabitant. The Oldest Inhabitant had a nose and chin thatapproximated so closely that Grant wondered how he shaved. He was a vainold party but he was the representative in this gathering of somethingmore powerful than any of them: Race Memory; and as such was to berespected.

'No use you draggin' any furner'n the village,' he said to Grant, as onegiving the under-gardener instructions.

'No?'

'No. No use. She lets everything down, there. Down into the mud.'

'She' was evidently the river.

'Why?'

'She go slow there. Tired, like. Drops everything. Then when she be roundthe turn, half-way to Wickham there, she go tearing off agin all light andhappy. Ah. That is what she do. Drops everything she be carrying into themud, and then she go quiet for a little, lookin' round t'see if peoplenotice what she done, then woops! she be off to Wickham at the tear.' Hecocked a surprisingly clear blue eye at Grant. 'Sly,' he said. 'That'swhat she be. Sly!'

Rodgers had said, when first he had talked to him, that it was no usedragging below Salcott St Mary, and he had accepted the local man'sverdict without asking for an explanation. Now here was Race Memoryoffering him the explanation.

'Not much use you draggin' anyway,' said Race Memory, wiping the drop fromits nose with a gesture that was subtly contemptuous.

'Why? Don't you believe there is a body there?'

'Oh, ah! Body there all right. But that mud there, it don't give upnothin' 'cept in its own time.'

'And when is that likely to be, would you say?'

'Oh! Any time 'tween a thousand years and tomorrow. Powerful sticky thatmud be. Quicksand mud. When my great-grandfer were a little boy he had abarra run down the bank, like, into the water. Quite shallow it werethere. He could see the barra but he were frightened, see, to wade in forit. So he run to the cottage. No more'n a few yards. And brung his fatherout to reach the barra for him. But the mud had it. Ah. The mud had it inthe time you'd turn yer back. Not a blink of the barra left. Not even whenthey got a rake and dragged for it. The mud had it, see. Cannibal mud,that is, I tell ee, cannibal mud.'

'But you say it does give up its victims sometimes.'

'Oh. Ah. Happen.'

'When? In flood?'

'Nah! In flood she just spread herself. Go broody and drop more mud'never. Nah. But sometime she be taken aback. Then she let go in surprise.'

'Taken aback?'

'Ah. Same as she were a week since. Cloud come and hit the high countryabove Otley and burst there, and pour water into the river like someonepouring bathwater away. She have no time to spread out decent and quiet.The water come down channel like a scouring brush and churn her up. Thenhappen sometimes she loose something from the mud.'

It was a poor outlook, Grant felt, if he had to wait until the nextcloudburst to recover Searle's body. The gathering greyness of the daydepressed him; in a couple of hours they would have to call it off. Bythat time, moreover, they would have reached Salcott, and if they hadfound nothing, what hope was there? He had had a horrible feeling all daythat they were merely scratching the surface of that 'immemorial mud'. Ifthis second dragging proved useless, what then? No inquest. No case. Nonothing.

By the time a watery sunset was bathing the scene in pallid light theywere within fifty yards of the end of their beat. And at that momentRodgers reappeared and produced an envelope from the pocket of his coat.

'This came for you when I was at the station. It's the report from theStates.'

There was no urgency about it now, but he opened it and read it through.

The San Francisco police had no record against Leslie Searle, and knew ofnone. He was in the habit of coming to the Coast for the winter months.For the rest of the year he travelled and photographed abroad. He livedwell but very quietly, and there was no record of expensive parties orother extravagances of conduct. He had no wife with him and no history ofemotional entanglements. The San Francisco police had no record of hisorigins but they had applied to the Publicity department at GrandContinental, for which studio Searle had photographed Lotta Marlow andDanny Minsky, the reigning stars of the moment. According to GrandContinental, Searle had been born in Jobling, Conn. Only child of DurfeySearle and Christina Mattson. Police at Jobling, Conn., asked about theSearles, said they left town more than twenty years ago and went Southsomewhere. Searle was a chemist, with a passion for photography, but thatis all anyone remembered about them.

Well, it was a dull enough report. An uninspiring collection of unhelpfulfacts. No clue to the thing he had wanted most; Searle's intimates in theStates. No illumination on Searle himself. But something in the reportrang a bell in his head.

He read it over again, waiting for that warning click in his mind that waslike the sound a clock makes when it is preparing to strike. But this timethere was no reaction.

Puzzled, he read it through again, slowly. What was it that had made thatwarning sound in his mind? He could find nothing. Still puzzled, he foldedup the paper and put it away in his pocket.

'We're finished, I suppose you know?' Rodgers said. 'We'll find nothingnow. Nothing has ever been taken back from the river at Salcott. In thispart of the country they have a proverb. When they want to say: Give athing up, or: Put it out of your mind for good, they say: "Throw it overthe bridge at Salcott".'

'Why don't they dredge the channel instead of letting all this stuff siltup on them,' Grant said, out of temper. 'If they did they wouldn't havethe river flooding their houses every second winter.'

Rodgers's long face shortened into amusement and kindliness. 'If you'dever smelt a bucket of Rushmere mud, you'd think a long time before you'dwillingly arrange for it to be dragged up in wagon loads and cartedthrough the street. Shall I stop them now?'

'No,' said Grant, mulishly. 'Let them go on dragging as long as the lightlasts. Who knows, we may make history and be the first to take somethingback from the river at Salcott. I never did believe in those countrysuperstitions, anyhow.'

They did go on dragging till the light went, but the river gave nothingback.

16

'Shall I give you a lift back to Wickham,' Rodgers asked Grant, butGrant said no, that he had his own car up at the Mill House and would walkup and fetch it.

Marta came out into the windy twilight to meet him, and put her armthrough his.

'No?' she said.

'No.'

'Come in and get warm.'

She walked beside him in silence into the house and poured him an out-sizewhisky. The thick walls shut out the sound of the wind, and the room wasquiet and warm as it had been last night. A faint smell of curry came upfrom the kitchen.

'Do you smell what I am cooking for you?'

'Curry. But you can't be expected to feed the Department.'

'Curry is what you need after a whole day of our English spring glories.You can, of course, go back to the White Hart and have the usual Sundayevening supper of cold tinned beef, two slices of tomato, three cubes ofbeetroot, and a wilting lettuce leaf.'

Grant shivered unaffectedly. The thought of the White Hart on a Sundayevening was death.

'Besides, tomorrow I shan't be here to give you dinner. I am going back totown. I can't stand the Mill House any more at the moment. I'll stay intown till Faint Heart goes into rehearsal.'

'Having you here has practically saved my life,' Grant said. He pulled theAmerican report from his pocket and said: 'Read that, would you, and tellme if anything rings a bell for you.'

'No,' she said, having read. 'No bells. Should it?'

'I don't know. It seemed to me when I read it first that it rang a bell inmy mind.' He puzzled over it again for a moment and then put it away.

'When we are both back in town,' Marta said, 'I want to be introduced toyour Sergeant Williams. Perhaps you would bring him to dinner one night?'

'But of course,' Grant said, pleased and amused. 'Why this sudden passionfor the unknown Williams?'

'Well, I have actually two different reasons. The first is that anyone whohas the mother-wit to see that Walter Whitmore is a "push-ee" is worthmeeting. And the second is that the only time I have seen you look happytoday was after talking to Sergeant Williams on the telephone.'

'Oh, that!' he said; and told her about Benny Skoll, and the Watchman,and Williams rebuking virtue. And so they were gay after all over theirSunday supper, with Marta supplying libellous stories of the Watchman'stheatre critic. So that it was not until he was going that she asked whathe was going to do now that the search for Searle had failed.

'I tidy up some ends here in Salcott tomorrow morning,' he said, 'and thenI go back to London to report to my chief.'

'And what happens then?'

'There is a conference to decide what action, if any, is to be taken.'

'I understand. Well, when you have got things straightened out ring me upand tell me, won't you. And then we can arrange a night when SergeantWilliams is free.'

How admirable, he thought as he drove away; how truly admirable. Noquestions, no hints, no little feminine probings. In her acceptance of asituation she was extraordinarily masculine. Perhaps it was this lack ofdependence that men found intimidating.

He went back to the White Hart, called the police station to know if therewere any messages, picked the menu off the dining-room sideboard to verifyMarta's prognostication as to supper (she had forgotten the stewed rhubarband custard, he must tell her) and for the last time went to bed in thelittle room under the roof. The text was no promise tonight. The Hour Cometh, indeed. What a lot of leisure women seemed to have had once. Nowthey had everything in cans and had no leisure at all.

But no, it wasn't that, of course. It was that they didn't spend theirleisure making texts in coloured wools any more. They went to see DannyMinsky and laughed themselves sick for one-and-tuppence, and if you askedhim it was a better way of recovering from the day's work than makingmeaningless patterns in purple cross-stitch. He glared at the text, tiltedthe lamp until the shadow blotted out his vision of it, and took hisnotebooks to bed with him.

In the morning he paid his bill, and pretended not to see the landlord'ssurprise. Everyone knew that the river-dragging had been unsuccessful, andeveryone knew that a piece of clothing recovered from the river had causedthat dragging (there, were various accounts of which particular piece ofclothing), so the landlord hardly expected Scotland Yard to be taking itsdeparture at this juncture. Unless there was a clue that no one knewabout?

'Coming back, sir?'

'Not immediately,' Grant said, reading his mind like a book and notparticularly liking the stigma of failure that was being tacked on to hisname at this moment.

And he headed for Trimmings.

The morning had an air of bland apology. It was smiling wetly and the windhad died. The leaves glittered and the roads steamed in the sun. 'Just myfun, dears,' the English spring was saying to the soaked and shiveringmortals who had trusted her.

As the car purred along the slope, towards Trimmings, he looked down atSalcott St Mary in the valley, and thought how odd it was that three daysago it was just a name that Marta used occasionally in conversation. Nowit was part of his mind.

And God send it wasn't going to be a burr stuck there for good!

At Trimmings he was received by the refayned Edith, who broke down enoughto look humanly scared for a moment when she saw him, and asked to seeWalter. She showed him into the fireless library; from which Walterrescued him.

'Come into the drawing-room,' he said. 'We use it as a living-room andthere is a fire there'; and Grant caught himself wondering ungratefullywhether it was his own comfort that Walter was considering or his guest's.Walter did affect one that way, he observed.

'I am going back to town this morning,' Grant said, 'and there are one ortwo small points I want to clear up before I make my report to mysuperiors.'

'Yes?' Walter was nervous and looked as if he had not slept.

'When I asked you about your journey down the Rushmere, you said that youhad picked up mail at arranged post-offices.'

'Yes.'

'On Monday there would have been nothing to pick up, but on Tuesday andWednesday you presumably picked up what there was. Did Searle have anyletters on either of those two days, can you remember?'

'There's no difficulty in remembering. Inspector, Searle never had anymail.'

'Never? You mean Searle had no letters at all while he was at Trimmings?'

'None that I ever knew about. But Liz would tell you. She deals with thepost when it comes in.'

How had he missed this small item of information, he wondered.

'Not even forwarded from his hotel or bank?'

'Not that I know of. He may have been letting it mount up. Some people areconstitutionally indifferent to letters.'

That was true; and Grant left it there.

'Then about this daily telephoning,' he said. 'You telephoned fromTunstall on Sunday night, from Capel on Monday night, from Friday Streeton Tuesday, and from where on Wednesday?'

'There's a call-box at Pett's Hatch. We had meant to camp actually atPett's Hatch, but that ruined mill looked dreary somehow, and I rememberedthe sheltered bit farther on where the river turns south, so we went on tothere.'

'And you told Trimmings about this proposed camp.'

'Yes, I told you already that we did.'

'I know you did. I don't mean to badger you. What I want to know now iswho talked to whom during that call from Pett's Hatch?'

Walter thought for a moment. 'Well, I talked to Miss Fitch first becauseshe was always waiting for the call, then Searle talked to her. Then AuntEm came—Mrs Garrowby—and talked to Searle for a little and then Ifinished up by talking to Mrs Garrowby myself. Liz hadn't come in from anerrand in the village, so neither of us talked to her on Wednesday.'

'I see. Thank you.' Grant waited, and then said: 'I suppose you don't feelable yet to tell me what the subject of your—disagreement was onWednesday night?' And as Walter hesitated: 'Is it because it was aboutMiss Garrowby that you are reluctant to discuss it?'

'I don't want her dragged into this,' Walter said, and Grant could nothelp feeling that this cliché was less the result of emotion than of aconviction that it was thus an Englishman behaved in the circumstances.

'I ask, as I said before, more as a way of obtaining enlightenment on thesubject of Leslie Searle than of pinning you down to anything. Was thereanything in that conversation, apart from Miss Garrowby's entry into it,that you would rather I didn't know?'

'No, of course not. It was just about Liz—about Miss Garrowby. It was anextremely silly conversation.'

Grant smiled heartlessly. 'Mr Whitmore, a policeman has experienced theabsolute in silliness before he has finished his third year in the force.If you are merely reluctant to put silliness on record, take heart. To meit will probably sound like something near wisdom.'

'There was no wisdom about it. Searle had been in a very odd mood all theevening.'

'Odd? Depressed?' Surely, thought Grant, we aren't going to have toconsider suicide at this late stage.

'No. He seemed to be invaded by an unwonted levity. And on the way fromthe river he began to twit me about—well, about my not being good enoughfor Liz. For my fiancée. I tried to change the subject, but he kept at it.Until I grew annoyed. He began enumerating all the things he knew abouther that I didn't. He would trot out something and say: "I bet you didn'tknow that about her."'

'Nice things?'

'Oh, yes,' Walter said instantly. 'Yes, of course. Charming things. But itwas all so needless and so provocative.'

'Did he suggest that he would be more appreciative in your place?'

'He did more. He said quite frankly that if he put his mind to it he couldcut me out. He could cut me out in a fortnight, he said.'

'He didn't offer to bet on it, I suppose?' Grant couldn't help asking.

'No,' Walter said, looking a little surprised.

Grant thought that some day he must tell Marta that she had slipped up inone particular.

'It was when he said that,' Walter said, 'about cutting me out, that Ifelt I couldn't stand him any more that night. It wasn't the suggestion ofmy not being his equal that I resented, I hope you understand, Inspector;it was the implied reflection on Liz. On Miss Garrowby. The implicationthat she would succumb to anyone who used his charms on her.'

'I understand,' said Grant gravely. 'Thank you very much for telling me.Do you think, then, that Searle was deliberately provoking a quarrel?'

'I hadn't thought of it. I just thought he was in a provocative mood. Thathe was a little above himself.'

'I see. Thank you. Could I speak to Miss Fitch for just one moment. Iwon't keep her.'

Walter took him to the morning-room where Miss Fitch, with a yellow and ared pencil stuck in her ginger bird's-nest and another in her mouth, wasprowling up and down like an enraged kitten. She relaxed when she sawGrant, and looked tired and a little sad.

'Have you come with news, Inspector?' she asked, and Grant, looking pasther, saw the fright in Liz's eyes.

'No, I've come to ask you one question, Miss Fitch, and then I shan'tbother you again. I apologise for bothering you as it is. On Wednesdaynight you were waiting for the evening call from your nephew with anaccount of their progress.'

'Yes.'

'So that you talked to him first. I mean first of the people at Trimmings.Will you go on from there?'

'Tell you what we talked about, you mean?'

'No; who talked to whom.'

'Oh. Well, they were at Pett's Hatch—I suppose you know—and I talked toWalter and then to Leslie. They were both very happy.'

Her voice wavered. 'Then I called Emma—my sister—and she spoke to themboth.'

'Did you wait while she spoke to them?'

'No, I went up to my room to see Susie Sclanders's imitations. She doesten minutes on a Wednesday once a month, and she is wonderful, and ofcourse I couldn't listen to her properly with Em talking.'

'I see. And Miss Garrowby?'

'Liz arrived back from the village just too late to talk to them.'

'What time was this, do you remember?'

'I don't remember the exact time, but it must have been about twentyminutes before dinner. We had dinner early that night because my sisterwas going out to a W.R.I. meeting. Dinner at Trimmings is always being puteither back or forwards because someone is either going somewhere orcoming from some place.'

'Thank you very much, Miss Fitch. And now, if I might see Searle's roomonce more I won't bother you again.'

'Yes, of course.'

'I'll take the Inspector up,' Liz said, ignoring the fact that Walter, whowas still hovering, was the normal person to escort him.

She got up from the typewriter before Miss Fitch could intervene with anyalternative proposal, and led the Inspector out.

'Are you going away because you have come to a conclusion, Inspector, orbecause you haven't; or shouldn't I ask that?' she said as they wentupstairs.

'I am going as a matter of routine. To do what every officer is expectedto do; to present his report to his seniors and let them decide what thefacts add up to.'

'But you do some adding first, surely.'

'A lot of subtraction, too,' he said, dryly.

The dryness was not lost on her. 'Nothing makes sense in this case, doesit,' she agreed. 'Walter says he couldn't have fallen into the riveraccidentally. And yet he did fall in. Somehow.'

She paused on the landing outside the tower room. There was a roof-lightthere and her face was clear in every detail as she turned to him andsaid: 'The one certain thing in this mess is that Walter had nothing to dowith Leslie's death. Please believe that, Inspector. I'm not defendingWalter because he is Walter and I am going to marry him. I've known himall my life, and I know what he is capable of and what he is not capableof. And he is not capable of using physical violence to anyone. Do pleasebelieve me. He—he just hasn't the guts.'

Even his future wife thought him a pushee, Grant observed.

'Don't be misled by that glove, either. Inspector. Do please believe thatthe most probable explanation is that Leslie picked it up and put it intohis pocket meaning to give it back to me. I have looked for the other oneof the pair in the car pocket and it isn't there, so the most likelyexplanation is that they fell out, and Leslie found one and picked it up.'

'Why didn't he put it back in the car pocket?'

'I don't know. Why does one do anything? Putting something in one's pocketis almost a reflex. The point is that he wouldn't have kept it for thesake of keeping it. Leslie didn't feel about me like that at all.'

The point, Grant thought to himself, wasn't whether Leslie was in lovewith Liz, but whether Walter believed Liz to be in love with Leslie.

He longed to ask Liz what happens to a girl when she is engaged to apushee and along comes a left-over from Eden, an escapee from Atlantis, ademon in plain clothes. But the question, though pertinent, wouldcertainly be unproductive. Instead, he asked her if Searle had everreceived letters during his stay at Trimmings and she said that as far asshe knew he had had none. Then she went away downstairs, and he went intothe tower room. The tidy room where Searle had left everything except hispersonality.

He had not seen it in daylight before, and he spent a few moments having alook at the garden and the valley from the three huge windows. There wasone advantage in not caring what your house looked like when it wasfinished; you could have your windows where they were likely to do mostgood. Then he turned once more to the task of going through Searle'sbelongings. Patiently, garment by garment, article by article, he wentthrough them, vainly hoping for some sign, some revelation. He sat in alow chair with the photographic box open on the floor between his feet,and accounted for everything that a photographer might conceivably use. Hecould think of nothing—neither chemical nor gadget—that was missing fromthe collection. The box had not been moved since last he saw it, and theempty space still held the outline of what had been abstracted.

It was an innocent space. Articles are abstracted every day from packedcases, leaving the outline of their presence. There was no reason whateverto suppose that what had been taken out was of any significance. But why,in heaven's name, couldn't anyone suggest what that thing might have been?

Once more he tried the small cameras in the space, knowing quite well thatthey would not fit. He even clapped a pair of Searle's shoes together andtried to fit them into the space. They were half an inch too long and thesoles protruded above the general level so that the tray would not fithome and the lid was prevented from shutting. Anyhow, why carry clothingin a photographic box when you had ample room in the appropriate cases?Whatever had occupied the space had not been put in at random or in haste.It had been a neat and methodical packing.

Which suggested that the thing was put there because only Searle himselfwould have the unpacking of it.

Well, this, in the elegant phrase, was where he got off.

He put everything neatly back as he had found it; took another look at theRushmere valley, and decided that he had had enough of it; and closed thedoor on the room where Leslie Searle had left everything but hispersonality.

17

It was grey in town, but it was a friendly grey and comforting after therainy levels of the Rushmere. And the young green of the trees inWestminster was vivid as fire against the dark background. It was nice tobe among his own kind again; to get into that mental undress that onewears among one's colleagues; to talk the allusive unexplanatory talk thatconstituted Headquarters' 'shop'.

But it was not so nice to think of the coming interview with Bryce. Wouldit be one of Bryce's good days or one of his 'off' ones? TheSuperintendent's average was one off day to three good ones, so the oddswere three to one in his favour. On the other hand it was damp weather andthe Superintendent's rheumatism was always worst in damp weather.

Bryce was smoking a pipe. So it was one of his good days. (On his off dayshe lit cigarettes and extinguished them in the ashtray five seconds afterhe had extinguished the match.)

Grant wondered how to begin. He couldn't very well say: Four days ago youhanded over a situation to me, and the situation as far as I'm concernedis in all essentials exactly what it was four days ago. But that, putbrutally, was how the case stood.

It was Bryce who saved him. Bryce examined him with his small shrewd eyes,and said: 'If ever I saw "Please, sir, it wasn't me" written on a man'sface, it is on yours now,' and Grant laughed.

'Yes, sir. It's a mess.' He laid his notebooks on the table and took thechair at the other side of the table that was known in the office as theSuspect's Seat.

'You don't think that Bunny-Boy Whitmore did it, then?'

'No, sir. I think it's unlikely to the point of absurdity.'

'Accident?'

'Bunny-Boy doesn't think so,' Grant said with a grin.

'Doesn't he, indeed. Hasn't he even enough sense to come in out of therain?'

'He's a simple sort of creature, in some ways. He just doesn't believethat it was accident, and says so. The fact that it would be to hisadvantage to have it proved an accident is irrelevant in his view,apparently. He is wildly puzzled and troubled about the disappearance. Iam quite sure he had nothing to do with it.'

'Any alternative suggestion?'

'Well, there is someone who had the opportunity, the motive, and themeans.'

'What are we waiting for?' Bryce said, flippant.

'Unfortunately the fourth ingredient is missing.'

'No evidence.'

'Not one sliver of a tittle.'

'Who is it?'

'The mother of Walter Whitmore's fiancée. Stepmother actually. She broughtLiz Garrowby up from babyhood and is fanatically maternal about her. Idon't mean possessive, but——'

'All the best for our Liz.'

'Yes. She was enormously pleased about her stepdaughter marrying hernephew, and keeping everything in the family, and I think Searle lookedlike upsetting the apple-cart. That is a possible motive. She has no alibifor the night in question, and she could have reached the place where theywere camped quite easily. She knew where it was because each evening themen telephoned Trimmings, the Fitch place, to report progress, and onWednesday night they described the place where they were going tobivouac.'

'But she couldn't know that the men would quarrel and go back to the riverseparately. How was she going to work it?'

'Well, there's an odd thing about that quarrel. Searle from all accountswas a markedly equable person, but it was he who provoked that quarrel. Atleast Whitmore says so, and I have no reason to doubt him. He twittedWhitmore about not being good enough for Liz Garrowby and boasted that hecould take her from him in a week. He was quite sober, so anything socompletely out of character must have had an ulterior motive.'

'You think he manufactured a parting with Searle that evening? Why?'

'It could have been because he hoped to meet Liz Garrowby somewhere. TheGarrowby girl was not at home that evening when the two men telephoned, soMrs Garrowby did proxy. I suggest that she might also have done proxy in amore serious way.'

'"Liz says will you meet her at the third oak past the old mill".'

'Something like that.'

'And then raging mother waits for him with a blunt instrument and tips thebody into the river. I wish to heaven you had been able to recover thatbody.'

'You don't wish it as badly as I do, sir. Without a corpse where are we?'

'Even with a corpse you have no case.'

'No. But it would be comforting, not to say illuminating, to know thestate of the skull bones.'

'Any evidence that Searle was interested in the girl?'

'He had one of her gloves in his collar drawer.'

Bryce grunted. 'I thought that sort of thing went out with valentines,' hesaid, unconsciously paraphrasing Sergeant Williams.

'I showed it to her and she took it well. Said that he had probably pickedit up and meant to give it back to her.'

'And now I'll tell one,' commented the Superintendent.

'She's a nice girl,' Grant said, mildly.

'So was Madeleine Smith. Any second favourite in the suspect stakes?'

'No. Just the field. The men who had no reason to love Searle, and had theopportunity and no satisfactory alibi.'

'Are there many?' Bryce said, surprised by the plural.

'There's Toby Tullis, who is still sick at the snubbing Searleadministered. Tullis lives on the river-bank and has a boat. His alibidepends on the word of an infatuated follower. There's Serge Ratoff thedancer, who loathed Searle because of the attention Toby paid him. Serge,according to himself, was dancing on the greensward by the river's rim onWednesday night. There's Silas Weekley, the distinguished Englishnovelist, who lives in the lane down which Searle disappeared from humanken on Wednesday night. Silas has a thing about beauty; has a constanturge to destroy it. He was working in a hut at the end of the garden thatnight, so he says.'

'No bets on the field?'

'N-o. I think not. A saver on Weekley, perhaps. He is the type that mightgo over the borderline any day, and spend the rest of his life happilytyping away in Broadmoor. But Tullis wouldn't jeopardise all he has builtup by a silly murder like this. He is much too shrewd. As for Ratoff, Ican imagine him setting off to do a murder, but long before he washalf-way there he would have another fine idea and forget what heoriginally set out to do.'

'Is this village entirely inhabited by crack-pots?'

'It has been "discovered", unfortunately. The aborigines are sane enough.'

'Well, I suppose there is nothing we can do until the body turns up.'

'If it turns up.'

'They usually do, in time.'

'According to the local police, five people have been drowned in theRushmere in the last forty years. That is, leaving Mere Harbour and theshipping part out of the reckoning. Two were drowned higher up thanSalcott and three lower down. The three who were drowned lower down thanSalcott all turned up within a day or two. The two who were drowned abovethe village have never turned up at all.'

'It's a nice look-out for Walter Whitmore,' Bryce commented.

'Yes,' Grant said, thinking it over. 'They weren't very kind to him thismorning.'

'The papers? No. Awfully good-mannered and discreet but they couldn't havemade pleasant reading for Bunny-Boy. A nasty spot to be in. No accusation,so no possible defence. Not that he has any,' he added.

He was silent for a little, tapping his teeth with his pipe as was hishabit when cogitating.

'Well, I suppose there is nothing we can do at the moment. You make a neatshipshape report and we'll see what the Commissioner says. But I don't seethat there is anything more we can do. Death by drowning, no evidence sofar to show whether accidental or otherwise. That's your conclusion, isn'tit?'

As Grant did not answer immediately, he looked up and said sharply: 'Isn'tit?'

Now you see it, now you don't.

Something wrong in the set-up.

Don't let your flair ride you, Grant.

Something phoney somewhere.

Now you see it, now you don't.

Conjurer's patter.

The trick of the distracted attention.

You could get away with anything if you distracted the attention.

Something phoney somewhere....

'Grant!'

He came back to the realisation of his chief's surprise. What was he tosay? Acquiesce and let it go? Stick to the facts and the evidence, andstay on the safe side?

With a detached regret he heard his own voice saying: 'Have you ever seena lady sawn in half, sir?'

'I have,' Bryce said, eyeing him with a wary disapproval.

'It seems to me that there is a strong aroma of sawn-lady about thiscase,' Grant said; and then remembered that this was the metaphor he hadused to Sergeant Williams.

But Bryce's reaction was very different from the Sergeant's.

'Oh, my God!' he groaned. 'You're not going to do a Lamont on us, areyou, Grant?'

Years ago Grant had gone into the farthest Highlands after a man and hadbrought him back; brought him back sewn up in a case so fault-proof thatonly the sentence remained to be said; and had handed him over with theremark that on the whole he thought they had got the wrong man. (Theyhad.) The Yard had never forgotten it, and any wild opinion incontradiction to the evidence was still known as 'doing a Lamont'.

The sudden mention of Jerry Lamont heartened Grant. It had been even moreabsurd to feel that Jerry Lamont was innocent, in the face of anunbreakable case, than it was to smell 'sawn-lady' in a simple drowning.

'Grant!'

'There's something very odd about the set-up,' Grant said stubbornly.

'What is odd?'

'If I knew that it would be down in my report. It isn't any one thing.It's the—the whole set-up. The atmosphere. The smell of it. It doesn'tsmell right.'

'Couldn't you just explain to an ordinary hard-working policeman whatsmells so wrong about it?'

Grant ignored the Superintendent's heavy-handedness, and said:

'It's all wrong from the beginning, don't you see. Searle's walking infrom nowhere, into the party. Yes, I know that we know about him. That heis who he says he is, and all that. We even know that he came to Englandjust as he says he did. Via Paris. His place was booked by the AmericanExpress office at the Madeleine. But that doesn't alter the fact that thewhole episode has something queer about it. Was it so likely that hewould be all that keen to meet Walter just because they were both friendsof Cooney Wiggin?'

'Don't ask me! Was it?'

'Why this need to meet Walter?'

'Perhaps he had seen him broadcast and just couldn't wait.'

'And he had no letters.'

'Who hadn't?'

'Searle. He had no letters all the time he was at Salcott.'

'Perhaps he is allergic to the gum on envelopes. Or I have heard thatpeople leave letters lying at their bank to be called for.'

'That's another thing. None of the usual American banks or agencies hasever heard of him. And there is one tiny thing that seems odd to me out ofall proportion to its actual value. Actual value to this case, I mean. Hehad a tin box, rather like an outsize paint-box, that he used to hold allhis photographic stuff. Something is gone out of the box. Somethingroughly 9 inches by 3-1/2 by 4, that was packed in the lower compartment(it has a tray like a paint-box with a deeper space below). Nothing thatis now among his belongings fits the space, and no one can suggest whatthe thing could have been.'

'And what is so odd about that? There must be a hundred and one thingsthat might have been packed in a space that size.'

'As what, for instance, sir?'

'Well—well, I can't think off-hand, but there must be dozens.'

'There is ample space in his other cases for anything he wanted to pack.So it wouldn't be clothes, or ordinary possessions. Whatever was there, inthe tin box, was something that he kept where only he would be likely tohandle it.'

Bryce's attention grew more sober at that.

'Now it is missing. It is of no obvious importance in this case. Noimportance at all, perhaps. It is just an oddity and it sticks in mymind.'

'What do you think he might have been after at Trimmings? Blackmail?'Bryce asked, with interest at last.

'I don't know. I hadn't thought of blackmail.'

'What could have been in the box that he could turn into cash? Notletters, that shape. Documents, perhaps? Documents in a roll.'

'I don't know. Yes, perhaps. The thing against the blackmail idea is thathe seemed to have ample means.'

'Blackmailers usually have.'

'Yes. But Searle had a profession that kept him very nicely. Only a hogwould want more. And somehow he didn't look to me like a hog.'

'Be your age, Grant. Just sit quiet for a moment and think of theblackmailers you have known.' He watched this shot go home, and said,dryly: 'Exactly!' And then: 'Who would you say was the blackmailee atTrimmings? Mrs Garrowby got a past, do you think?'

'Possibly,' Grant said, considering Emma Garrowby in a new light. 'Yes, Ithink it's quite possible.'

'Well, the choice isn't very wide. I don't suppose Lavinia Fitch was everout on the tiles?'

Grant thought of kind, anxious little Miss Fitch, with the bristlingpencils in her mop of hair, and smiled.

'There isn't much choice, you see. I suppose if it was blackmail at all itmust have been Mrs Garrowby. So your theory is that Searle was murderedfor a reason that has nothing to do with Liz Garrowby.' And as Grant madeno immediate answer to that, 'You believe that it was murder, don'tyou.'

'No.'

'No!'

'I don't believe he's dead.'

There was a moment of silence. Then Bryce leaned forward over the tableand said with immense self-control: 'Now, look here, Grant. Flair's flair.And you're entitled to your whack of it. But when you take to throwing itabout in chunks it becomes too much of a good thing. Have a littlemoderation, for Pete's sake. You've been dragging a river for a whole dayyesterday trying to find a drowned man, and now you have the nerve to sitthere and tell me you don't think he was drowned at all. What do you thinkhe did? Walked away barefoot? Or hobbled away disguised as a one-leggedman supported by crutches which he had tossed off in an idle moment from acouple of oak branches? Where do you think he went to? What is he going tolive on from now on? Honestly, Grant, I think you must need a holiday.What, just tell me what, put this notion into your head? How does atrained detective mind jump from a straightforward case of "missingbelieved drowned" into a wild piece of fantasy that has no connection withanything in the case at all?'

Grant was silent.

'Come on, Grant. I'm not ribbing you. I really want to know. How do youarrive at the conclusion that a man isn't drowned after finding his shoein the river? How did the shoe get there?'

'If I knew that, sir, I'd have my case.'

'Did Searle have a spare pair of shoes with him?'

'No. Just the ones he was wearing.'

'The one that was found in the river.'

'Yes, sir.'

'And you still think he didn't drown?'

'Yes.'

There was a silence.

'I don't know which to admire more, Grant: your nerve or yourimagination.'

Grant said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. He was bitterlyaware that he had already said too much.

'Can you think of any theory, however wild, that would fit your idea ofhis being alive?'

'I can think of one. He could have been abducted, and the shoe tossed inthe river as evidence of drowning.'

Bryce regarded him with dramatised respect. 'You mistook your vocation,Grant. You're a very good detective, but as a writer of detective fictionyou'd make a fortune.'

'I was only answering your challenge and supplying a theory to fit thefacts, sir,' Grant said mildly. 'I didn't say I believed in it.'

This slowed Bryce down a little. 'Take them out of a hat like rabbits, doyou. Theories in all sizes to fit any figure! No compulsion to buy! Walkup! Walk up!' He stopped and looked for a long moment at Grant'simperturbable face, sat slowly back in his chair, relaxed, and smiled.'You damned poker-face, you!' he said amiably. He searched in his pocketfor matches. 'Do you know what I envy about you, Grant? Your self-control.I'm always flying off the handle about something or other; and it doesn'tdo me or anyone else any good. My wife says that it is because I'm notsure of myself and I'm afraid I'm not going to get my way. She attended acourse of six lectures on psychology at Morley College, and there isnothing about the human mind she doesn't know. I can only conclude thatyou must be damned sure of yourself behind that nice equable temper ofyours.'

'I don't know, sir,' Grant said, amused. 'I was anything but equable whenI came in to report, and had nothing to show you but a situation that wasexactly the same as it was when you handed it over to me four days ago.'

'So you said: "How's the old man's rheumatism today? Is he approachable ordo I go on all fours?"' His little elephant eyes twinkled for a moment.'Well, I suppose we present the Commissioner with your neat report of thefacts as they exist, and leave him in ignorance of the finer flights ofyour imagination.'

'Oh, yes, sir. I can't very well explain to the Commissioner that I have afeeling in the pit of my stomach.'

'No. And if you'll take my advice, you'll stop paying so much attention tothe rumblings of your stomach, and stick to what goes on in your head.There is a little phrase commonly used in police work that says, "inaccordance with the evidence". You say that over six times a day as agrace before and after meals, and perhaps it will keep your feet on theground and stop you ending up thinking you're Frederick the Great or ahedgehog or something.'

18

In his schooldays Grant had learned that if he was stumped by a problemit paid to leave it alone for a while. A proposition that had seemedinsoluble the night before was simple to the point of being obvious in thelight of morning. This was a lesson that he learned for himself andconsequently never forgot, and he took it with him both into his personallife and into his work. Whenever he reached deadlock he transferred hisattention. So now, although he did not follow Bryce's advice about thedaily ritual, he did give heed to his words about ignoring 'the rumblingsof his stomach'. Where the Searle affair was concerned he had reacheddeadlock, so he withdrew his attention and thought upon Tom Thumb. Thecurrent Tom Thumb being an 'Arab' potentate who had lived at a Strandhotel for a fortnight, and had disappeared without the formality of payinghis bill.

The daily routine, a routine where there was always more work than men todo it, sucked him back into its vortex, and Salcott St Mary disappearedfrom the forefront of his mind.

Then, on a morning six days later, his mind flung it back at him.

He was walking along the south pavement of the Strand on his way to lunchin Maiden Lane, pleased with the report that he was going to give Brycewhen he went back to the Yard, and wondering idly at the large display ofwomen's shoes in a street as unpopular with women as the Strand. Thethought of women's shoes reminded him of Dora Siggins and the slippers shehad bought for the dance, and he smiled a little to himself as he began tocross the street, remembering her vitality and her chatter and herfriendly sharpness. She had nearly left the shoes behind after all, heremembered; even after missing a bus home in order to buy them. They hadbeen lying on the seat because they wouldn't fit into her packed shoppingbag, and he had had to point them out to her. An untidy parcel in cheapbrown paper, with the heels——

He stopped dead.

A taxi driver, his face contorted with rage and fright, yelled somethinginto his ear. Brakes screamed as a lorry came to a halt at his elbow. Apoliceman, hearing the yelling brakes and the protests, made slow butpurposeful movements in his direction. But Grant did not wait. He flunghimself against the next approaching taxi, wrenched the door open, andsaid 'Scotland Yard and quick' to the driver.

'Exhibitionist!' said the driver, and chugged away to the Embankment.

But Grant did not hear him. His mind was busy on the old sucked-dryproblem that suddenly seemed so new and exciting now that he had taken itout again. At the Yard he looked for Williams and when he had found him hesaid: 'Williams, remember saying on the telephone that all your Wickhamnotes were good for was the wastepaper basket? And I said never to destroynotes.'

'I remember,' Williams said. 'When I was in town picking up Benny Skolland you were at Salcott dragging the river.'

'You didn't by any chance take my advice, did you?'

'Of course I took your advice, sir. I always take your advice.'

'You have those notes somewhere?'

'I have them right here in my desk.'

'May I see them?'

'Certainly, sir. Though I don't know if you can read them.'

It was certainly not easy. When Williams wrote a report it was in afaultless schoolboy script, but when making notes for his own use heindulged in a hieroglyphic shorthand of his own.

Grant flipped over the pages looking for what he wanted.

'"The 9.30 Wickham to Crome",' he murmured. '"The 10.5 Crome to Wickham.The 10.15 Wickham to Crome." 'M. 'M. "Farm lane: old"——old what andchild?'

'Old labourer and child. I didn't detail what they had in the buses tostart with. Just what they picked up on the road.'

'Yes, yes; I know; I understand. "Long Leat crossroads." Where is that?'

'It's a "green" place, a sort of common, on the outskirts of Wickham,where there's a collection of Fair stuff. A merry-go-round and things.'

'I remember. "Two roundabout men, known." Is it "known"?'

'Yes; known to the conductor personally from other journeys.'

'"Woman going to Warren Farm, known." What comes after that, Williams?'

Williams translated to him what came after that.

Grant wondered what Williams would think if he flung his arms round himand embraced him, after the fashion of Association Footballers tosuccessful goal shooters.

'May I keep this for the moment?' he asked.

He could keep it for good, Williams said. It wasn't likely to be much goodnow. Unless—unless, of course——

Grant could see the dawning realisation that this sudden interest in hisnotes must come from more than academic curiosity on Grant's part; but hedid not wait to answer the coming question. He went to see Bryce.

'It's my belief,' Bryce said, glaring at him, 'that the lower ranks inthis institution prolong hotel cases so that they can sit in the back roomwith the manager and be given drinks on the house.'

Grant ignored his libellous pleasantry.

'Is this a routine report before you sit down to a nice leisurely lunch,or have you something to tell me?'

'I think I've got something that will please you, sir.'

'It will have to be very good to please me today, as perhaps you'venoticed.'

'I've discovered that he had a passion for cherry brandy.'

'Very interesting, I must say. Fascinatingly interesting! And whatgood do you think——' A wonderful thought suddenly brightened the bleaksmall eye. He looked at Grant, as one colleague to another. 'No' hesaid. 'Not Hamburg Willy!'

'Looks like it, sir. It has all the earmarks; and he'd make a very goodArab with that Jewish profile of his.'

'Hamburg! Well, well! What did he get out of it that was worth the risk?'

'Soft living for a fortnight; and some fun.'

'It's going to be expensive fun. I suppose you've no idea where he canhave skipped to?'

'Well, I remembered that he has been living with Mabs Hankey, and Mabs isdoing a turn at the Acacias in Nice this spring; so I spent most of themorning on the telephone and I find that our Willy, or what I take to beour Willy, is staying there as Monsieur Goujon. What I came to ask, sir,was if, now that it is routine, someone else could take over theextradition and all that and leave me free for a day or two to dosomething else.'

'What do you want to do?'

'I've got a new idea about the Searle case.'

'Now, Grant!' Bryce said, in warning.

'It's too new'—'and too silly,' he added to himself—'to talk about, butI would very much like to spend a little time on it and see if it worksout, sir.'

'Well, I suppose, after the cherry brandy, you think I can't very wellrefuse you.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'But if it doesn't look like panning out, I hope you'll drop it. There'splenty of work right here without you running after rainbows and pots ofgold.'

So Grant walked out of the Superintendent's room in pursuit of his pot ofgold, and the first thing he did was to go to his own room and take outthe report that the San Francisco police had sent them about Searle. Hestudied it for a long time, and then sent a polite request to the policeof Jobling, Conn.

Then he remembered that he had not yet had lunch. He wanted quiet in whichto think, so he put the precious sheet of paper into his wallet and wentout to his favourite pub, where the rush would be over and they wouldmanage to scrape up something for him. He still did not know what in thataccount of Searle's life in America had rung a bell in his mind when hehad first read it. But he was beginning to have an idea as to what kindof thing it was that had rung that bell.

As he was walking out of the pub after lunch he knew what it might havebeen.

He went back to the Yard and consulted a reference book.

Yes, it was that.

He took out the San Francisco report and compared it with the entry in thereference book.

He was jubilant.

He had the important thing. The thing he needed to stand on. He had theconnection between Searle and Walter Whitmore.

He rang up Marta Hallard, and was told that she was rehearsing for FaintHeart. She would be at the Criterion this afternoon.

Feeling ridiculously like a bubble—so help me, you could bounce me like aball, he thought—he floated up to Piccadilly Circus. I feel just the wayTommy Thrupp looked last Sunday morning, he thought. Twice as large aslife, with lightning shooting out of my head like toasting-forks.

But the Criterion in the throes of a rehearsal afternoon soon reduced himto life-size and brought his feet back on to the ground.

He walked in through the foyer, stepped over the symbolical barrier of adraped cord, and went down the stairs into the earth without interferencefrom anyone. Perhaps they think I look like an author, he thought, andwondered who had written Faint Heart. No one ever did know who hadwritten a play. Playwrights must lead blighted lives. Fifty to one, on anactuary's reckoning, against their play running more than three weeks; andthen no one even noticed their name on the programme.

And something like a thousand to one against any play ever getting as faras rehearsals even. He wondered whether the author of Faint Heart wasaware that he was one in a thousand, or whether he was just sure of it.

Somewhere in the bowels of the earth he came on the elegant little boxthat was the Criterion's auditorium; a little ghostly in the cold light ofunshaded electrics, but reticent and well-bred. Various dim shapes layabout in the stalls, and no one made any move to ask his business.

Marta, alone on the stage with a horse-hair sofa and a scared-lookingyoung man, was saying: 'But I must lie on the sofa, Bobby darling. It'sa waste of my legs if I just sit. Everyone looks the same from the kneesdown.'

'Yes, Marta, you are right, of course,' said Bobby, who was the dim figureprowling up and down in front of the orchestra pit.

'I don't want to alter your conception in any way, Bobby, but I dothink——'

'Yes, Marta dear, you are right, of course, so right. No, of course itwon't make any difference. No, I assure you. It really is all right. It'lllook grand.'

'Of course it may be difficult for Nigel——'

'No, Nigel can come round behind you before he says his line. Try it,Nigel, will you.'

Marta draped herself over the horse-hair and the scared-looking boy wentaway and made his entrance. He made his entrance nine times. 'Well, it'scoming,' Bobby said, letting him away with the ninth.

Someone in the stalls went out and came back with cups of tea.

Nigel said his line above the sofa, to the right of the sofa, to the leftof the sofa, and without relation to the sofa at all.

Someone came into the stalls and collected the empty cups.

Grant moved over to a lonely lounger and asked: 'When do you think I shallbe able to speak to Miss Hallard?'

'No one will be able to speak to her if she has much more of Nigeltoday.'

'I have very important business with her.'

'You the clothes man?'

Grant said that he was a personal friend of Miss Hallard's and must talkto her for a few moments. He wouldn't keep her longer than that.

'Oh.' The dim figure crawled away and consulted with another. It was likesome muffled ritual.

The consulted one detached himself from the group of shadows to which hebelonged and came over to Grant. He introduced himself as thestage-manager, and asked what exactly it was that Grant wanted. Grant saidthat at the very first opportunity would someone tell Miss Hallard thatAlan Grant was here and wanted to speak to her for a moment.

This worked; and during the next pause, the stage-manager crept on to thestage and bending apologetically over Marta murmured something in awood-pigeon undertone.

Marta got up from the couch and came down to the edge of the stage,shading her eyes in an effort to see beyond the lights into the darkauditorium.

'Are you there, Alan?' she said. 'Come through the pass door, will you?Show him where it is, someone.'

She came to meet him at the pass door and was plainly glad to see him.'Come and have a cup of tea in the wings with me while the young loversget on with it. Thank God that I shall never again have to be one of apair of young lovers! The theatre's most boring convention. You've nevercome to rehearsal before, Alan! What moved you to it?'

'I would like to say that it was intellectual curiosity, but I'm afraid itis just business. You can help me, I think.'

She helped him enormously; and never once asked what these questions mightmean.

'We haven't had that dinner with your Sergeant Williams,' she said as shewent away to make the young lovers look like amateurs and wish that theyhad gone on the land.

'If you wait for a week or so, Sergeant Williams and I may have a story totell you.'

'Splendid. I've earned it, I feel. I've been so good and discreet.'

'You've been wonderful,' he said, and went away out the back way into thelane with a slight recurrence of the jubilation that had floated him downthe stairs at his entrance.

Armed with the information Marta had given him, he went to Cadogan Gardensand interviewed the housekeeper of some furnished flats.

'Oh, yes, I remember,' she said. 'They ran about a lot together. Oh, no,she didn't stay here. These are bachelor flats; I mean, flats for one. Butshe was around a lot.'

And by that time London was shutting up shop for the night and there wasnothing more he could do until the police of Jobling, Conn., supplied himwith the information he had asked for. So he went home early for once, hada light supper, and went to bed. He lay for a long time working it out inhis mind. Working out the details. Working out the wherefore.

Toby Tullis had wanted to know what made Leslie Searle tick; and Grant,too, lying with his eyes on the ceiling, unmoving for an hour at a time,was looking for the mainspring of Leslie Searle's mind.

19

It was forty-eight hours before word came from Jobling, Conn., and halfa dozen times in those forty-eight hours Grant was on the brink of goingto that woman in Hampstead and dragging the truth from her by main force.But he restrained himself. He would deal with her presently. Her lieswould be neatly laid out on a plate, and presented to her when the timecame.

He would wait for that report.

And the report when it came proved worth waiting for.

Grant read it through in one swift eye movement, and then he sat back andlaughed.

'If any one wants me for the rest of the day,' he said to SergeantWilliams, 'I'll be at Somerset House.'

'Yes, sir,' Williams said, subdued.

Grant glanced at Williams's unwontedly sober features—Williams was alittle hurt that Grant was playing a lone hand over this—and was remindedof something.

'By the way, Williams, Miss Hallard is very anxious to meet you. She hasasked me if I would bring you to dinner one night.'

'Me?' said Williams going pink. 'What on earth for?'

'She has fallen a victim to your reported charms. She asked me to arrangea night when you were free. I feel in my bones this morning that bySaturday both you and I will be in a state for celebration; and it wouldbe appropriate if we celebrated with Marta, I think. Saturday any good toyou?'

'Well, Nora and I usually go to the movies on Saturday, but when I'm onduty she goes with Jen. That's her sister. So I don't see why sheshouldn't go with Jen this week.'

'When she hears that you are going to dine with Marta Hallard she'llprobably start divorce proceedings.'

'Not her. She'll wait up for me so that she can ask me what Marta Hallardwas wearing,' said Williams, the Benedict.

Grant rang to ask Marta if he could bring Sergeant Williams to meet her onSaturday night, and then went away and buried himself in Somerset House.

And that night he did not lie awake. He was like a child that goes tosleep because that way it will quickly be tomorrow. Tomorrow, the onesmall piece would fall into place and make the pattern whole.

If the one small piece happened not to fit, of course, then the wholepicture was wrong. But he was pretty sure that it would fit.

In the short interval between putting out the lamp and falling asleep heranged sleepily over the 'field'. When that one small piece fell intoplace tomorrow, life would be a great deal happier for a great manypeople. For Walter, naturally; Walter would have the shadow of suspicionlifted from him. For Emma Garrowby, with her Liz made safe. For Liz?Relief unspeakable for Liz. And relief for Miss Fitch—who might, hesuspected, be a little sad, too. But she could always put it in a book. Ina book was where the thing belonged.

Toby would have quite special reasons for self-congratulation, Grantthought; and laughed. And Serge Ratoff would be comforted.

Silas Weekley would not care at all.

He remembered that Marta had remarked on how 'nice' Leslie and Liz hadbeen together. ('A natural pair,' she said—but she could never haveguessed how natural!) Was it just possible that Liz would be hurt whenthat one small piece fell into place tomorrow? He hoped not. He liked LizGarrowby. He would like to think that Searle had meant nothing to her.That she would find nothing but happiness and relief in the vindication ofher Walter.

What was it Marta had said? 'I don't think Walter knows anything aboutLiz, and I have an idea that Leslie Searle knew quite a lot.' (Surprising,how Marta had seen that without any clue to the source of Searle'sunderstanding.) But it did not matter very much, Grant thought, thatWalter did not know very much about Liz. Liz, he was quite sure, knew allthat was to be known about Walter; and that was a very good basis for ahappy married life.

He fell asleep wondering if being married to someone as nice andintelligent and lovable as Liz Garrowby would compensate a man for theloss of his freedom.

A procession of his loves—romantic devotions most of them—trailed awayinto the distance as his mind blurred into unconsciousness.

But in the morning he had thought for only one woman. That woman inHampstead.

Never, even at his most callow, had he gone to see any woman with aneagerness as great as the one that was taking him to Holly Pavement thismorning. And he was a little shocked as he got off the bus and walkedtowards the Holly Pavement turning to find that his heart was thumping. Itwas a very long time indeed since Grant's heart had thumped for any but apurely physical reason.

Damn the woman, he thought, damn the woman.

Holly Pavement was a backwater filled with sunlight; a place so quiet thatthe strutting pigeons seemed almost rowdy. Number nine was a two-storeyhouse, and the upper storey had been apparently converted into a studio.There were two push-buttons on the bell plaque with neat wooden labelsalongside. 'Miss Lee Searle', said the upper one; 'Nat Gansage:Accessories', said the lower.

Wondering what 'accessories' were, Grant pressed the upper button, andpresently heard her coming down the wooden stairs to the door. The dooropened, and she was standing there.

'Miss Searle?' he heard himself say.

'Yes,' she said, waiting there in the sunlight, unperturbed but puzzled.

'I am Detective-Inspector Grant of the C.I.D.' Her puzzlement deepened atthat, he noticed. 'A colleague of mine, Sergeant Williams, came to see youin my stead a week ago because I was otherwise engaged. I would like verymuch to talk to you myself, if it is convenient.'

And it had better be convenient, blast you, he said in his mind; furiousat his racing heart.

'Yes, of course,' she said equably. 'Come in, won't you. I live upstairs.'

She shut the door behind him and then led him up the wooden stairs to herstudio. A strong smell of coffee—good coffee—pervaded the place and asshe led him in she said: 'I've just been having my breakfast. I have madea bargain with the paper boy that he should leave a roll for me everymorning with the paper, and that is my breakfast. But there is lots ofcoffee. Will you have some, Inspector?'

They said at the Yard that Grant had two weaknesses: coffee, and coffee.And it smelt wonderful. But he wasn't going to drink anything with LeeSearle.

'Thank you, but I have just had mine.'

She poured another cup for herself, and he noticed that her hand was quitesteady. Damn the woman, he was beginning to admire her. As a colleague shewould be wonderful.

She was a tall woman, and spare; very good-looking in her bony fashion andstill quite young. She wore her hair in a thick plait, coronet-wise. Thelong housecoat she was wearing was made of some dull green stuff, ratherlike one Marta had; and she had the long legs that helped to give Martaher elegance.

'Your resemblance to Leslie Searle is remarkable,' he said.

'So we have been told,' she said shortly.

He moved round the room to look at the Scottish pictures that were stillpropped up on view. They were orthodox impressions of orthodox scenes, butthey were painted with a savage confidence, a fury, so that they shoutedat one from the canvas. They didn't present themselves to one, theyattacked. 'Look, I'm Suilven!' shouted Suilven, looking odder and moreindividual than even that mountain had ever looked. The Cooling, agrape-blue rampart against a pale morning sky, were a whole barrier ofarrogance. Even the calm waters of Kishorn were insolent.

'Did it stay fine for you?' Grant asked, and then, feeling that that wastoo impudent, added: 'The West of Scotland is very wet.'

'Not at this time of year. This is the best time.'

'Did you find the hotels comfortable? I hear they are apt to beprimitive.'

'I didn't trouble the hotels. I camped out in my car.'

Neat, he thought. Very neat.

'What was it you wanted to talk to me about?'

But he was in no hurry. She had caused him a lot of trouble, this woman.He would take his time.

He moved from the pictures to the rows of books on the shelves, andconsidered the titles.

'You have a liking for oddities, I see.'

'Oddities?'

'Poltergeists. Showers of fish. Stigmata. That sort of thing.'

'I think all artists are attracted by the odd, whatever their medium,don't you?'

'You don't seem to have anything on transvestism.'

'What made you think of that?'

'Then you know the term?'

'Of course.'

'It is something that doesn't interest you?'

'The literature of the subject is very unsatisfactory, I understand.Nothing between learned pamphlets and News of the World.'

'You ought to write a treatise on the subject.'

'I?'

'You like oddities,' he said smoothly.

'I am a painter, Inspector, not a writer. Besides, no one is interestednowadays in female pirates.'

'Pirates?'

'They were all pirates or soldiers or sailors, weren't they?'

'You think the fashion went out with Phoebe Hessel? Oh, by no means. Thething is continually turning up. Only the other day a woman died inGloucestershire who had worked for more than twenty years hauling timberand coal, and even the doctor who attended her in her last illness had noidea that she was not a man. I knew a case personally, not long ago. Ayoung man was charged in a London suburb with theft. Quite a normalpopular young man. Played a good game of billiards, belonged to a men'sclub, and was walking out with one of the local beauties. But whenmedically examined he turned out to be quite a normal young woman. Ithappens somewhere or other every year or two. Glasgow. Chicago. Dundee. InDundee a young woman shared a lodging-house ward with ten men and wasnever questioned. Am I boring you?'

'Not at all. I was only wondering whether you considered them oddities inthe sense that stigmata and poltergeists are.'

'No; oh, no. Some, of course, are genuinely happier in men's things; but agreat many do it from love of adventure, and a few from economicnecessity. And some because it is the only way in which they can work outtheir schemes.'

She sipped her coffee with polite interest, as one indulging an uninvitedguest until he should reach the point of stating what he had come for.

Yes, he thought, she would make a wonderful ally.

His heart had slowed down to its proper rate. These were moves in a gamethat he had been playing a long time; the game of mind against mind. Andnow he was interested in her reaction to his moves. She had withstoodundermining. How would she stand up to direct attack?

He came away from the bookshelves and said: 'You were very devoted to yourcousin, Miss Searle.'

'Leslie? But I have already——'

'No. Marguerite Merriam.'

'Mar——. I don't know what you are talking about.'

That was a mistake. If she had stopped to think for a moment, she wouldhave realised that there was no reason at all to deny the connection withMarguerite. But the unexpectedness of that name on his lips had startledher, and she had fallen headlong.

'So devoted that you couldn't think quite straight about her.'

'I tell you——'

'No, don't tell me anything. I'll tell you something. Something that oughtto make confidences between us quite easy, Miss Searle. I encounteredLeslie Searle at a party in Bloomsbury. One of those literary gatherings.He wanted to be introduced to Lavinia Fitch and I agreed to present him.As we pushed through the crowd we were flung together at very closequarters; in fact it was breathing-room only. A policeman is trained toobserve, but I think even without that I would have noticed any variationin detail that was presented to me at that range. He had very fine greyeyes, Leslie Searle, and there was a small brown fleck in the iris of theleft one. I have lately spent a good deal of time, and a great deal oflabour and thought, trying to account for Leslie Searle's disappearance,and with native wit and considerable luck I got to the stage where Ineeded only one small thing to make my case complete. A small brown fleck.I found it on the doorstep down there.'

There was complete silence. She was sitting with her coffee cup in herlap, looking down at it. The slow ticking of a wall clock sounded loud andponderous in the quiet.

'It's an odd thing, sex,' Grant said. 'When you laughed with me, caught inthe crush that day, I had a moment of being suddenly out of countenance.Disconcerted. The way a dog is sometimes when it is laughed at. I knew ithad nothing to do with your laughing, and I could not think why else Ishould have been disconcerted. About 12.45 last Monday I began the processof realising why; and was nearly run over by a taxi in consequence.'

She had looked up at this; and now she said in a kind of detachedinterest: 'Are you the star turn at Scotland Yard?'

'Oh, no,' Grant assured her. 'I come in bundles.'

'You don't talk like something out of a bundle. Not any bundles I've beenacquainted with. And no one out of a bundle could have—could have foundout what happened to Leslie Searle.'

'Oh, I'm not responsible for that.'

'No?—Who is, then?'

'Dora Siggins.'

'Dora——? Who is she?'

'She left her shoes on the seat of my car. Tied up in a neat parcel. Atthe time they were just Dora Siggins's shoes tied up in a parcel. But at12.45 last Monday, right in the path of a taxi, they became a parcel ofthe required dimensions.'

'What dimensions?'

'The dimensions of that empty space in your photographic box. I did try apair of Searle's shoes in that space—you must allow me so much—butyou'll admit that no run-of-the-mill hard-working one-of-a-bundledetective would think up anything so outré as a parcel containing one pairof women's shoes and a coloured silk head-square. By the way, mysergeant's recorded description of the woman who joined the bus at thatcross-roads where the fair is, says: Loose gaberdine raincoat.'

'Yes. My burberry is a reversible one.'

'Was that part of the preparation too?'

'No; I got it years ago, so that I could travel light. I could camp out init, and go to afternoon tea with the inside out.'

'It is a little galling to think that it was I who paved the way for thispractical joke of yours by my anxiety to be helpful to the stranger withinthe gates. I'll let strangers stand after this.'

'Is that how it seems to you?' she said slowly. 'A practical joke?'

'Let us not quibble about terms. I don't know what you call it toyourself. What it actually is, is a practical joke of particularbrutality. I take it that your plan was either to make a fool of WalterWhitmore or to leave him in the soup.'

'Oh, no,' she said simply. 'I was going to kill him.'

Her sincerity was so patent that this brought Grant up all standing.

'Kill him?' he said, all attention and his flippancy gone.

'It seemed to me that he shouldn't be allowed to go on living,' she said.She took her coffee cup off her lap to put it on the table, but her handwas shaking so much that she could not lift it.

Grant moved over and took it from her, gently, and set it down.

'You hated him because of what you imagined he had done to MargueriteMerriam,' he said, and she nodded. Her hands were clasped in her lap in avain effort to keep them steady.

He was silent for a moment or two, trying to get used to the idea that allthe ingenuity that he had taken to be her slick exit from a masquerade hadbeen in reality a planned get-out to murder.

'And what made you change your mind?'

'Well—oddly enough, the first small thing was something Walter said. Itwas one evening after Serge Ratoff had made a scene in the pub.'

'Yes?'

'Walter said that when one was as devoted as Serge was to anyone oneceased to be quite sane about it. That made me think a bit.' She paused.'And then, I liked Liz. She wasn't at all what I had pictured. You see, Ihad pictured her as the girl who had stolen Walter from Marguerite. Andthe real Liz wasn't like that at all. That sort-of bewildered me a little.But the real thing that stopped me was—was that—that——'

'You found out that the person you loved had never existed,' Grant saidquietly.

She caught her breath and said: 'I don't know how you could have guessedthat.'

'But that is what happened, isn't it?'

'Yes. Yes, I found out—— People didn't know that I had any connectionwith her, you see, and they talked quite unguardedly. Marta, especially.Marta Hallard. I went back with her one night after dinner. She told methings that—shocked me. I had always known that she was wild and—andheadstrong—Marguerite, I mean—but one expects that of genius, and sheseeed so—so vulnerable that one forgave——'

'Yes, I understand.'

'But the Marguerite that Marta and those other people knew was someone Ididn't know at all. Someone I wouldn't even have liked if——. I rememberwhen I said that at least she lived, Marta said: "The trouble was thatshe didn't allow anyone else to. The suction she created," Marta said,"was so great that her neighbours were left in a vacuum. They eitherexpired from suffocation or they were dashed to death against the nearestlarge object." So you see, I didn't feel like killing Walter any more. ButI still hated him for leaving her. I couldn't forget that. That he hadwalked out on her and she had killed herself because of it. Oh, I know, Iknow!' she added, as she saw his interruption coming. 'It was not that sheloved him so much. I know that now. But if he had stayed with her shewould be alive today, alive, with her genius and her beauty and her gayloveliness. He might have waited——'

'Till she tired?' Grant supplied, more dryly than he had intended, and shewinced.

'It wouldn't have been long,' she said, with sad honesty.

'May I change my mind and have some of that coffee after all?' Grant said.

She looked at her uncontrolled hands and said: 'Will you pour it out?'

She watched him as he poured, and said: 'You are a very strangepoliceman.'

'As I said to Liz Garrowby when she made the same remark: It may be youridea of policemen that's strange.'

'If I had had a sister like Liz how different my life would have been. Ihad no one but Marguerite. And when I heard that she had killed herself Isuppose I just went a little crazy for a spell. How did you find out aboutMarguerite and me?'

'The police in San Francisco sent us an account of you, and in it yourmother's name was given as Mattson. After much too long an interval Iremembered that in Who's Who in the Theatre, which I had been using onenight to pass the time while I waited for a telephone call, MargueriteMerriam's mother was also given as a Mattson. And since I had been lookingfor some connection between you and Walter, it seemed that I might havefound it if you and Marguerite were cousins.'

'Yes. We were more. We were both only children. Our mothers wereNorwegian, but one married in Britain and one in America. And then, when Iwas fifteen, my mother took me to England, and I met Marguerite for thefirst time. She was nearly a year older than me, but she seemed younger.Even then she was brilliant. Everything she did had a—a shiningquality. We wrote to each other every week from then on, and every yearuntil my parents died we came to England in the summer, and I saw her.'

'How old were you when your parents died?'

'They died in a flu epidemic when I was seventeen. I sold the pharmacy butkept the photographic side, because I liked it and was good at it. But Iwanted to travel. To photograph the world and everything that wasbeautiful in it. So I took the car and went West. I wore pants in thosedays just because they were comfortable and cheap, and because when youare five feet ten you don't look your best in girlish things. I hadn'tthought of using them as—as camouflage until one day when I was leaningover the engine of the car a man stopped and said: "Got a match, bud?" andI gave him a light; and he looked at me and nodded and said: "Thanks,bud," and went away without a second glance. That made me think. A girlalone is always having trouble—at least in the States she is—even a girlof five feet ten. And a girl has a more difficult time getting an "in" ina racket. So I tried it out for a little. And it worked. It worked like adream. I began to make money on the Coast. First photographing people whowanted to be movie actors, and then photographing actors themselves. Butevery year I came to England for a little. As me. My name actually isLeslie, but mostly they called me Lee. She_ always called me Lee.'

'So your passport is a woman's one.'

'Oh, yes. It is only in the States that I am Leslie Searle. And not allthe time there.'

'And all you did before going to the Westmorland was to hop over to Paris,and lay the track of Leslie Searle in case anyone proved inquisitive.'

'Yes. I've been in England for some time. But I didn't actually think I'dneed that track. I meant to do away with Leslie Searle too. To find somejoint end for Walter and him. So that it would not be apparent that it wasmurder.'

'Whether it was murder or just, as it turned out, leaving Whitmore in thesoup, it was a pretty expensive amusement, wasn't it?'

'Expensive?'

'One very paying photographer's business, one complete gent's outfit invery expensive suitings, and assorted luggage from the best makers. Whichreminds me, you didn't steal a glove of Liz Garrowby's, did you?'

'No, I stole a pair. Out of the car pocket. I hadn't thought of gloves,but I suddenly realised how convincing women's gloves are. If there is anydoubt, I mean, as to your sex. They are almost as good as lipstick. Youforgot my lipstick, by the way—in the little parcel. So I took that pairof Liz's. They wouldn't go on, of course, but I meant to carry them. Igrabbed them in a hurry out of my collar drawer because Walter was comingalong the passage calling to know if I was ready, and later I found that Ihad only one. Was the other one still there in the drawer?'

'It was. With the most misleading results.'

'Oh!' she said, and looked amused and human for the first time. Shethought for a little and then said: 'Walter will never take Liz forgranted again. That is one good thing I have done. It is poetic justicethat it should have been a woman who did that. It was clever of you toguess that I was a woman just from the outside of a little parcel.'

'You do me too much honour. It never even crossed my mind that you mightbe a woman. I merely thought that Leslie Searle had gone away disguised asa woman. I thought they were probably your things, and that he had gone toyou. But the giving up of the whole of Searle's life and belongingspuzzled me. He wouldn't do that unless he had another personality to stepinto. It was only then that I began to wonder whether Searle wasmasquerading and wasn't a man at all. It didn't seem as wild an idea as itmight have, because I had so lately seen that case of arrest for theftthat turned out so surprisingly. I had seen how easily it could be done.And then there was you. Staring me in the face, so to speak. A personalityall ready for Searle to dissolve into. A personality who had mostconveniently been painting in Scotland while Searle was fooling theintelligentsia in Orfordshire.' His glance went to the art display.'Did you hire these for the occasion, or did you paint them?'

'Oh, I painted them. I spend my summers in Europe painting.'

'Ever been in Scotland?'

'No.'

'You must go and see it sometime. It's grand. How did you know thatSuilven had that "Look-at-me!" look?'

'That is the way it looked on the postcard. Are you Scottish? Grant is aScottish name, isn't it?'

'A renegade Scot. My grandfather belonged to Strathspey.' He looked at theserried ranks of canvas evidence and smiled. 'As fine and wholesale andconvincing an alibi as ever I saw.'

'I don't know,' she said, doubtfully, considering them. 'I think toanother painter they might be far more of a confession. They'reso—arrogantly destructive. And angry. Aren't they. I would paint them alldifferently today now that I have known Liz, and—grown up, and Margueritehas died in my heart as well as in reality. It is very growing-up to findthat someone you loved all your life never existed at all. Are youmarried, Inspector?'

'No. Why?'

'I don't know,' she said vaguely. 'I just wondered how you understood soquickly about what had happened to me over Marguerite. And I suppose oneexpects married people to be more sympathetic to emotional vagaries. Whichis quite absurd, because they are normally far too cluttered up with theirown emotional problems to have spare sympathy. It is the unattached personwho—who helps. Won't you have some more coffee?'

'You make coffee even better than you paint.'

'You haven't come to arrest me, or you wouldn't be drinking my coffee.'

'Quite right. I wouldn't. I wouldn't even drink the coffee of a practicaljoker.'

'But you don't mind drinking with a woman who planned long and elaboratelyto kill someone?'

'And changed her mind. There are quite a few people I would willingly havekilled in my time. Indeed, with prison no more penitential than a not verygood public school, and the death sentence on the point of beingabolished, I think I'll make a little list, à la Gilbert. Then when Igrow a little aged I shall make a total sweep—ten or so for the price ofone—and retire comfortably to be well cared-for for the rest of my life.'

'You are very kind,' she said irrelevantly. 'I haven't really committedany crime,' she said presently, 'so they can't prosecute me for anything,can they?'

'My dear Miss Searle, you have committed practically every known crime inthe book. The worst and most unforgivable being to waste the time of theoverworked police forces of this country.'

'But that isn't a crime, is it? That is what the police are there for. Idon't mean: to have their time wasted, but to make sure that there hasbeen nothing fishy about a happening. There isn't any law that can punishone for what you have called a practical joke, surely?'

'There is always "breach of the peace". It is quite wonderful what avariety of things can be induced to come under the heading of breach ofthe peace.'

'And what happens when you breach the peace?'

'You are treated to a little homily and fined.'

'Fined!'

'A quite inappropriate sum, more often than not.'

'Then I shan't be sent to prison?'

'Not unless you have done something that I don't yet know about. And Iwouldn't put it past you, as they say in Strathspey.'

'Oh, no,' she said. 'No. You really do know all about me. I don't know howyou know all you do, if it comes to that.'

'Our policemen are wonderful. Hadn't you heard?'

'You must have been pretty sure that you knew all about me before you camelooking for that brown fleck in my iris.'

'Yes. Your policemen are wonderful too. They looked up the births inJobling, Conn., for me. The infant that Mr and Mrs Durfey Searle took withthem when they left Jobling for points south, was, they reported, female.After that I would have been surprised to death if there had been no brownfleck.'

'So you ganged up on me.' Her hands had stopped shaking, he noticed. Hewas glad that she had reached the stage of achieving a flippancy. 'Are yougoing to take me away with you now?'

'On the contrary. This is my farewell to you.'

'Farewell? You can't have come to take farewell of someone you don'tknow.'

'Where our mutual acquaintance is concerned I, as they say, have theadvantage of you. I may be quite new to you—or practically new—but youhave been in my hair for the last fourteen days, and I shall be very gladto get you out.'

'Then you don't take me to a police station or anything like that?'

'No. Not unless you show any signs of beating it out of the country. Inwhich case an officer would no doubt appear at your elbow with a pressinginvitation to remain.'

'Oh, I'm not going to run away. I am truly sorry for what I have done. Imean, for the trouble—and I suppose the—the misery I have caused.'

'Yes. Misery is the appropriate word, I feel.'

'I am sorry most of all for what Liz must have suffered.'

'It was gratuitously wicked of you to stage that quarrel at the Swan,wasn't it?'

'Yes. Yes, it was unforgivable. But he maddened me so. He was so smug. Sounconsciously smug. Everything had always been easy for him.' She saw thecomment in his face, and protested: 'Yes, even Marguerite's death! He wentstraight from that into Liz's arms. He never really knew desolation. Orfear. Or despair. Or any of the big, grinding things in life. He wasquite convinced that nothing irretrievable would ever happen to him. Ifhis "Marguerite" died there would always be a "Liz" there. I wanted himto suffer. To be caught in something that he couldn't get out of. To meettrouble and for once be stuck with it. And you can't say I wasn't right!He'll never be so smug again. Will he? Will he, then!'

'No, I suppose not. Indeed, I'm sure not.'

'I'm sorry Liz had to be hurt. I would go to prison if I could undo that.But I've given her a much better Walter than the one she was going tomarry. She really is in love with that poor egotistical wretch of acreature, you know. Well, I've made him over for her. I'll be surprised ifhe isn't a new man from now on.'

'If I don't go, you'll be proving to me that you are a public benefactorinstead of an offender under breach-of-the-peace.'

'What happens to me now? Do I just sit and wait?'

'A constable will no doubt serve you solemnly with a summons to appear ata magistrate's court. Have you a lawyer, by the way?'

'Yes, I have an old man in a funny little office who keeps my letters tillI want them. He's called Bing, Parry, Parry, and Bing, but I don't thinkhe is any of them, actually.'

'Then you had better go and see him and tell him what you have done.'

'All of it?'

'The relevant bits. You can probably leave out the quarrel at the Swan,and anything else that you're particularly ashamed of.' She reacted tothat, he noticed. 'But don't leave out too much. Lawyers like to know; andthey are almost as unshockable as the police.'

'Have I shocked you, Inspector?'

'Not noticeably. You've been a pleasant change from the armed robberiesand the blackmail and the confidence tricks.'

'Shall I see you when I am charged?'

'No. A lowly sergeant will be there to give evidence, I expect.'

He took his hat and prepared to go, looking once more at the one-man showof the West Highlands.

'I really ought to take a picture with me as a souvenir,' he said.

'You can have any one you want. They are going to be obliterated anyhow.Which would you like?' It was obvious that she did not quite know whetherhe was serious or not.

'I don't know. I like Kishorn, but I can't remember Kishorn being asaggressive as that. And if I took the Cooling there would be no room forme in the room too.'

'But it's only thirty inches by——' she was beginning, and thenunderstood. 'Oh. I see. Yes, it is intrusive.'

'I don't think I have time to wait and choose. I must leave it, I'mafraid. But thank you for the offer.'

'Come back one day when you have more time and choose at your leisure,'she said.

'Thank you. I may do that.'

'When the court has made an honest woman of me.' She went to the stairswith him. 'It's a bit of an anti-climax, isn't it? To set out to killsomeone and end with breach of the peace.'

The detachment in this caught his attention, and he stood for a longmoment looking at her. After a little he said, as one giving judgment:'You're cured.'

'Yes, I'm cured,' she said sadly. 'I shall never be green again. It waslovely while it lasted.'

'It's nice grown-up, too,' Grant said comfortingly, and went away down thestairs. When he opened the door he looked back to find that she was stillthere watching him. 'By the way,' he said, 'what are accessories?'

'What? Oh!' She laughed a little. 'Belts and bibs and bows and brashlittle bouquets for women to put in their hair.'

'Goodbye,' Grant said.

'Goodbye, Detective-Inspector Grant. I am grateful to you.'

He went away into the sunlight, at peace with the world.

As he walked down to the bus stop a lovely mad notion came to him. Hewould ring up Marta and ask her if she wanted another woman for Saturdaynight, and she would say yes, bring anyone you would like, and he wouldbring them Lee Searle.

But of course he could not do that. It would be sadly unbecoming in anofficer of the Criminal Investigation Department; indicating a lightnessof mind, a frivolity, that could only be described as deplorable in thecircumstances. It was all very well for the Lee Searles of this world,people who had not yet quite grown up, to indulge their notions, but foradults, and sober adults at that, there were the convenances.

And of course there were compensations. Life was entirely constructed ofcompensations.

The fantastical was for adolescents; for adults there were adult joys.

And no joy of his 'green' years had ever filled his breast with a moretingling anticipation than the thought of Superintendent Bryce's face whenhe made his report this morning.

It was a glorious and utterly satisfying prospect.

He could hardly wait.

[End of To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey]